Is using splash pages considered cloaking?

[achilles13]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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?

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[mediabase]

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.

[mediabase]

Ok Keri I will make it more clear .

Thanks for your suggestion.

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[coremediadesign]

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

[mediabase]

| 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

http://www.seologic.com/faq/doorway-pages .

[Francisco_Meza]

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q

[RageHats]

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.

[Mcarle]

I don't know if it will hurt SEO but it will totally hurt conversions & sales.