8 replies to this topic

[azs]

I'm working on a site where the designer created a sort of splash page. When you click on the main URL, it takes to this initial page, which then links to the real homepage with the link "http://www.sample.com/home.htm". Does this effect SE rankings? I noticed that despite the fact the site's 40+ internal pages link back the that "http://www.sample.com/home.htm" URL, Google is not registering any back links.

Should I suggest the real homepage be the index.htm page as opposed to home.htm?

azs

Edited by azs, 15 September 2003 - 03:06 AM.

[dzinerbear]

Splash pages are a nice idea, but they're pretty useless as far as functionality is concerned (at least in my opinion).

In terms of search engines, they're even more useless. Consider that search engines really like text. A splash page is usually just graphics or a Flash intro, and if this is the case, a search engine has nothing to index.

I don't know how true this is (they'll correct me if I'm wrong) but I've heard that a lot of search engines view the index page at the site's most important page. With that in mind, if you don't have anything on it (except a picture) you're missing an important opportunity.

Think about it another way, if your index page talks about blue widgets and 10 other sites out on the Net link to your site saying, "For more info about blue widgets see this site" and they make the "blue widgets" the link, then the search engine will come along and say, "Hey, this blue widget link goes to this page that talks an awful lot about blue widgets, I'd better check this site out, it looks pretty good."

What's the search engine going to say if the "blue widget" link goes to site with a nice picture on the linked page. Not much, I'd say.

Bottom line, your designer needs to begin considering the design criteria for getting your site a good ranking, if your company needs search engine traffic that is.

Don't worry a terrible amount about the backlinking thing. They say around these boards that if the sites linking to you aren't at least a PR 3 or 4, Google won't show them. Rather than worrying about PR, concentrate on making your site the best you can; otherwise, you'll just spend endless hours worrying about something that ultimately you don't have a lot of control over.

I wonder what Freud would say about all of this Page Rank obsession. Reminds me of the comedian who was talking about men and maps, and she said: "Only a man can grasp the concept of one half inch equalling 100 miles." (I'm a man, so there.)

Dzinerbear

[air-dog]

Hello All,

Hmmmm, I think that you made quite a lot of good points there dzinerbear and I believe them to be true as well.

As for splash pages. It would be a wasted opportunity in most cases but I think you have to consider what type of business the website is for.

If for example you have a design business dealing in High-End visuals, Then a splash home page could be one of the most important page/features of your website.

Its could be that this type of company only provides a website as a complementary service for their business and has no real need to acquire business from the internet.

All said and done though, I expect you, azs, want good targeted traffic from the search engines and if this is the case, I really wouldn’t have a splash page.

[Scottie]

If you absolutely must have a splash page, you will sacrifice some rankings for it. If you have a business owner or CEO or designer who insists on a splash page, please make sure they of the consequences and willing to trade search engine visibility for an artistic statement or "coolness".

Without text, the SE does not know what the page is about and has to rely on link text to make a judgement. That's fine if you have tons of incoming links, but most of us don't. Your home page is your most important page simply because that is what most sites (including directories) will link to.

For usability purposes, the best thing you can do if you must have a splash page is set a cookie to only show it once and then skip it on future visits. The most fascinating and artistic splash page is rarely interesting more than once.

I have done focus group testing on splash pages and after the first visit, the response is overwhelmingly negative. If the spash page isn't totally cool, the first visit is negative as well. No one is impressed by your logo spinning in to the screen and your tagline zooming across the bottom.

Except, maybe your mother.

[SearchRank]

Whether or not to use of a splash page will depend upon your target audience. For instance, if you are selling "green widgets" to the Phoenix metropolitan area, most likely you are not going to have that much competition and can position yourself quite well with a well optimized title tag, meta description tag and an alt tag or two. However, if you are trying to sell the green widgets on a national or even global scale, you are probably going to have alot more competition and therefore you would want a well optimized home page with good html textual content.

We had a client that used a flash sniffer page for the longest time. You would hit the main page, see a bunch of light gray text over a white background for an instance while the JavaScript checked to see if you had a Flash plug in or not. If you did you were sent to one page and if not, to another. First off, seeing the ugly page for a second was not very appealing and secondly it was hurting their positioning efforts. After much prompting from us, they finally removed the sniffer page and replaced it with the page you would go to if you had a Flash plug in. Because the Flash piece is simply an animated graphic on the page and the fact that most people have the Flash plug in, they decided to do away with the "splash" sniffer page. Their rankings went up shortly afterwards.

[Jill]

Does this effect SE rankings? I noticed that despite the fact the site's 40+ internal pages link back the that "http://www.sample.com/home.htm" URL, Google is not registering any back links.

Are you saying that home.htm doesn't have any backlinks or that index.htm doesn't?

If you've got 40+ pages in Google, that's good. At least you're getting spidered. If you request any links or directory links point to home.htm that could help solve your problem.

Or as you said and the others have suggested, just get rid of home.htm altogether and make that be your real home page since it is not providing any useful info currently.

Good luck!

Jill

[compar]

Further to what Scottie said I believe that a lot of savvy surfers don't even appreciate the splash page on the fiirst visit. Not only does it hurt your SE ranking, but it actually may be driving visitors away.

We have what we think is a pretty cool flash page. It is actually a graphical representation of our entire web site with the different parts image mapped so that they can be used as navigation.

We do not use it as our home page. Rather we have a clearly defined link on our home page to this flash page. So if anyone loves flash or otherwise is interested they can see this cool stuff. But we would never consider using it as out index.html page.

[csjavi]

The SEO side of splash screens is already covered in previous posts. I'll comment on spash screens in general.

I can't remember ever seeing a useful splash screen. On some (very few) sites a splash screen might be ok. My usual response is to click the link to the actual content or the back button. Too often there is no link or the link doesn't work in non-IE browsers That leaves me no choice: "Too bad, it could have been a nice site. We'll never know."

[Webnauts]

Splash screens are definetely not usable!
Your goal should be deeper consistency among pages, rather than superficial consistency suggested by common splash screens...

Here are some interesting articles about this topic:

http://www.apogeehk.com/2013-147.html

http://wdvl.internet...ity/use1_5.html