The SEO effect of adding a front page to a website?
-
I have a client that wants to add a front page to a website so that when a user visitors the site for the first time a full page advert/message/page appears before they enter the site. The client wants this to be cookie controlled so they only see this on the first visit to the website.
I am concerned that even if I put links to a sitemap or xml sitemap on this page that it will affect how well the site performs in search engines. Any ideas/suggestions or experiences?
I found an interesting page on Quora about using pop ups.... Anyone who comments can you link to some good research and a clear simple explanation I can use to explain to the client why this is a bad idea..... https://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/How-would-a-pop-up-ad-on-a-websites-home-page-affect-SEO
And for the record I tried the usability argument....
-
You have to be very careful about this, as Keri suggested. Google can crawl some JS, especially basic stuff, and if they detect a clear intent to present different content to crawlers and people, you can get into trouble fast.
I would say, though, that pop-overs are pretty common these days. These are usually just a CSS-styled box that appears, with an ad, survey, etc., often the first time you visit a site. Even some reputable survey engines used them.
Now, I still think you should absolutely test this for usability issues, but if the pop-over is just an overlay that appears the first time a user visits, the SEO consequences should be minimal.
-
Definitely agree on A/B testing. Nothing will win the argument faster than definitive data that this approach is costing sales.
-
Just to chime in here-the usability argument is so important it should probably even trump the SEO considerations.
Usability is about conversion. It doesn't matter how much traffic you can drive to your website, if the usability sucks and drives visitors away, any traffic would be wasted.
On most of the sites on which I've worked, conversion rate optimization gives vastly better return on investment than just trying to drive more traffic.
But this shouldn't be an argument. This is a perfect example of something that should simply be A/B tested, so that the data from actual users will determine the correct answer. No best practices are going to accurately predict the preferences of users on all types of sites. I've seen examples where pop-ups were actually very effective for business goals, despite the fact that so many people bitch about them.
A fairly quick A/B test of your home page with and without a large pop-up would very quickly tell you whether the process was adding value to the visitor's experience or driving them away.
[But I gotta say, an early 2000's era splash page as the front page of your website sounds like a complete non-starter to me, SEO problems or not.]
Paul
-
That post talks about Google crawling javascript, but doesn't address presenting one thing to Google and another to users.
Here's what Google has to say, and would likely be the reason for your thumbs down:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
Some examples of cloaking include:
- Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
- Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor
If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash, see our recommendations for making that content accessible to search engines and users without cloaking.
-
If it is a negative user response it will be a negative SEO response in most cases. In your case there could be very negative affects. An instant 'back' click is a bad sign to Google, especially it being the homepage.
-
Interesting.... So now I'm just up against the userability argument. Looks like it's do-able then with no negative SEO side-effects.
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
-
B2B site targeting 20,000 companies with 20,000 dedicated "target company pages" on own website.
An energy company I'm working with has decided to target 20,000 odd companies on their own b2b website, by producing a new dedicated page per target company on their website - each page including unique copy and a sales proposition (20,000 odd new pages to optimize! Yikes!). I've never come across such an approach before... what might be the SEO pitfalls (other than that's a helluva number of pages to optimize!). Any thoughts would be very welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
Hi all, We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip. However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it? The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalhothouse
2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this. Thanks in advance!0 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Wordpress - Dynamic pages vs static pages
Hi, Our site has over 48,000 indexed links, with a good mix of pages, posts and dynamic pages. For the purposes of SEO and the recent talk of "fresh content" - would it be better to keep dynamic pages as they are or manually create static pages/ subpages. The one noticable downside with dynamic pages is that they arent picked up by any sitemap plugins, you need to manually create a separate sitemap just for these dynamic links. Any thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi1 -
SEO structure question: Better to add similar (but distinct) content to multiple unique pages or make one unique page?
Not sure which approach would be more SEO ranking friendly? As we are a music store, we do instrument repairs on all instruments. Currently, I don't have much of any content about our repairs on our website... so I'm considering a couple different approaches of adding this content: Let's take Trumpet Repair for example: 1. I can auto write to the HTML body (say, at the end of the body) of our 20 Trumpets (each having their own page) we have for sale on our site, the verbiage of all repairs, services, rates, and other repair related detail. In my mind, the effect of this may be that: This added information does uniquely pertain to Trumpets only (excludes all other instrument repair info), which Google likes... but it would be duplicate Trumpet repair information over 20 pages.... which Google may not like? 2. Or I could auto write the repair details to the Trumpet's Category Page - either in the Body, Header, or Footer. This definitely reduces the redundancy of the repeating Trumpet repair info per Trumpet page, but it also reduces each Trumpet pages content depth... so I'm not sure which out weighs the other? 3. Write it to both category page & individual pages? Possibly valuable because the information is anchoring all around itself and supporting... or is that super duplication? 4. Of course, create a category dedicated to repairs then add a subcategory for each instrument and have the repair info there be completely unique to that page...- then in the body of each 20 Trumpets, tag an internal link to Trumpet Repair? Any suggestions greatly appreciated? Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
NAP - effect of adding a word to the name of businesss
Hello, I'm faced with a decision which requires some feedback from experts like you. My client has a business which has inconsistent citation submissions out the ying yang. For examples sake their business is called "brand all types body repair", where "brand" is the parent company who owns my client's company, and "all types body repair" is my client's company. In most of their existing citations the phone number and address are all consistent, but some citations contain the name "brand all types body repair", and others just "all types body repair". The name used on their website's NAP is "all types body repair"; however the name used on the larger directories like the BBB and yellow pages is "brand all types body repair". Also since they are registered in the BBB as this, "brand all types body repair" is their legal business name. Since they are registered in the BBB as "brand all types body repair" my thoughts are to ensure every citation uses this as the name. Three questions come out of this: I'm not really changing the name, only adding a brand word in front of the existing name. Will this have less of an effect than changing the name completely? If I change the name on their website from "all types body repair" to "brand all types body repair", will that have a negative affect on search rankings if some of the citations are already using "brand all types body repair"? What would you do about the name issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven751 -
Pricing Page vs. No Pricing Page
There are many SEO sites out there that have an SEO Pricing page, IMO this is BS. A SEO company cannot give every person the same quote for diffirent keywords. However, this is something we are currently debating. I don't want a pricing page, because it's a page full of lies. My coworker thinks it is a good idea, and that users look for a pricing page. Suggestions? If I had to build one (which I am debating against) is it better to just explain why pricing can be tricky? or to BS them like most sites do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0