Is using splash pages considered cloaking?
-
For example I'm thinking of running people through a squeeze page when they come from search engines (for first time visitors only/cookied) ... example: http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Is it going to hurt SEO? Because basically you are serving a page that is different, than the one displayed in the SERP's.
-
Hi Jeffrey,
I think you'll see that most people are adverse to having some type of intermediate step to take before they see the home page. Can you explain to us a little more of how you envision this to happen technically, and what you're hoping to accomplish with it for your business?
-
Harald,
You might want to view the example that the original poster is using. It's closer to a lightbox effect than the splash screen that either of those two links describe.
-
Hello Jeffrey, I think that using splash pages will definitely hurt the Search Engines & this effects would easily recognized on the SEO.
I short it will affects the websites.
For more details please refer to the below link:
http://www.shimonsandler.com/splash-pages-bad-for-usability-bad-for-seo/
&
http://seofreelancingindia.wordpress.com/category/splash-page/
Thanks.
-
Ok Keri I will make it more clear .
Thanks for your suggestion.
-
Harald, this isn't quite what the user is asking about. The first link is fairly old, and the OP is looking at a different type of technology.
-
It is not a great idea due to the fact that:
-
First of all you're redirecting visitor to a different page then they are suppose to see - that is not a great user experience, which might cost you a high bounce rate (people actually not going any further).
-
Splash pages usually don't contain anything that could help you with the rankings i.e. links with the keywords etc. though obviously your site might have a different splash page.
-
There is a big chance that at some point you will loose the position in the SERPs because the page doesn't actually serve the requested content
My advice - do NOT do it - here's some reading you might find useful: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#2
And how the Crawling and Cookies can work together : http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/50/help_gsa/crawl_cookies.html
-
-
| Hi Jeffrey, |
Splash Pages are the web pages that do not have enough content in them which tell the spiders of he search engines that not to indexed these types of pages & this will results in cloaking & these cause search engines to penalized you.
We know that using these splash pages in our websites would definitely results in loss. Below is link which helps you to know more about using the splash pages
-
Uhhh, I don't know how to answer this without sounding mean, but your site (I don't care how strong it is) is not going to convince Google to make an acception like they do for the President of the United States. You will beat yourself before you ever get started.
What Matt Cutts. He writes the algorithm for Google.
-
In my experience, there is at least a minor ranking hit. If nothing else, the google bot crawls your site alot slower for sure. If its a new site, or a site with a few links... I would definitely not risk it.
-
I don't know if it will hurt SEO but it will totally hurt conversions & sales.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How important is it to have separate Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages?
How important is it to Google's algorithm for a site to have separate PP and TOU pages? Is it necessary for a Terms of Use page in the SEO perspective?
Technical SEO | | agpz0 -
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Create Page Titles from H1 using Yoast?
I'm working on a site that has 280 blog posts that have either been migrated from an old CMS site or created on the Dev version of the new WordPress site. We've written 280 unique meta descriptions so they don't truncate but it there a quick way I can export the current H1s and then import them into Yoast so they are set as the Page Titles? I've written unique Page Titles and meta descriptions for all the Service and Products page and just want a way to speed up the blog posts as their H1s are really good and what I would use as Page Titles anyway. Any help, greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading (used for emphasis)?
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading? My clients are using heading tags for text they want to emphasize and make stand out. Does this affect search rankings for SEO?
Technical SEO | | jthompson05130 -
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0