Google+ Adds Ability To Restrict Viewership Of Posts By Age And Location

Google+ has given page owners with content that is inappropriate for young people or illegal in certain countries a way to restrict their audience.

The new restrictive targeting feature offers the ability to prevent viewing of all posts from a page or profile by people under 18 or 21. The settings can also be customized and there’s an Alcohol setting with suggested presets to block viewing access to countries where alcoholic beverages are prohibited.

The age restriction will prevent viewing by signed-on users who have given their date of birth in connection with their Google account. Users not signed into Google won’t be able to see age-restricted content either. The geographical restrictions will apply whether users are signed in or out and “will not affect visibility of content for search engines/web crawlers,” Google said on its help page about the feature.

Currently, the targeting restrictions only work on Google+ posts, both retroactively and for any posts made after adjusting settings, but Google said it might “expand the coverage of your specified settings to automatically affect other content added by your page.”

For now, the settings will not apply to:

• The page name, profile photo, and cover photo
• All local information for local pages, including address, phone number, and user reviews
• Photos (including those shared through posts), communities, hangouts, events, reviews, and Google+ content other than posts
• Comments that you’ve made from the page
• Your YouTube channel or videos unless otherwise restricted