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
-
Page for page 301 redirects from old server to new server
Hi guys:
Technical SEO | | cindyt-17038
I have a client who is moving their entire ecommerce site from one hosting platform (Yahoo Store) to another (BigCommerce) and from one domain to another. The old domain is registered with the Yahoo as of yesterday and we have redirected the old domain (at the domain level) to the new domain. However, we are having trouble getting the pages to redirect page for page. Currently they are all redirecting to the new domain home page. We did just move the old domain from GoDaddy to Yahoo yesterday thinking this would solve it however as of this morning the old pages are still redirecting to the home page of the new domain. To complete the 301 redirect picture, we uploaded the redirects (all relative links for both from and to) to BigCommerce. And while the domain was hosted at GoDaddy with a redirect to the new domain, they were working. We moved the domain to Yahoo because of email issues thinking it should still work. Is it possibly just a waiting game now as the change populates across the DNS? old url to test:
rock-n-roll-action-figures.com/fender-jazz-bass-miniature-guitar-replica-classic-red-finish.html0 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
Should I deindex my pages?
I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place. Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.
Technical SEO | | maxweb0 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?
Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page. I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already: a.) in the site's navigation b.) in the sidebar More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article? I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed. Just so I understand this... a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed? b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled? Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | Spencer_LuminInteractive0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Discrepency between # of pages and # of pages indexed
Here is some background: The site in question has approximately 10,000 pages and Google Webmaster shows that 10,000 urls(pages were submitted) 2) Only 5,500 pages appear in the Google index 3) Webmaster shows that approximately 200 pages could not be crawled for various reasons 4) SEOMOZ shows about 1,000 pages that have long URL's or Page Titles (which we are correcting) 5) No other errors are being reported in either Webmaster or SEO MOZ 6) This is a new site launched six weeks ago. Within two weeks of launching, Google had indexed all 10,000 pages and showed 9,800 in the index but over the last few weeks, the number of pages in the index kept dropping until it reached 5,500 where it has been stable for two weeks. Any ideas of what the issue might be? Also, is there a way to download all of the pages that are being included in that index as this might help troubleshoot?
Technical SEO | | Mont0