An seo and spider crawling question

[Tim W]

I am building a site with a decorative 'entry' page which is index.htm .
Meaning there is a first page with virtually no content at all, just a
welcoming image which you can click to take you through to the first
page of content and navigation. The Entry page can have a title and meta
keyword stuff but does the absence of content mean that I should exclude
it from indexing robot type things? I believe it can be done.

Tim w

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I am building a site with a decorative 'entry' page which is index.htm .
Meaning there is a first page with virtually no content at all, just a
welcoming image which you can click to take you through to the first
page of content and navigation.

Splash pages will hardly do any good. Users will lose interest fast.

The Entry page can have a title and meta
keyword stuff but does the absence of content mean that I should exclude
it from indexing robot type things? I believe it can be done.

You can exclude it, and that way you would vote against yourself. Links
pointing to your site would point to a page that tells search engines
not to index it. What will they think about that?

You could use <meta name=robots content="noindex, follow">, suggesting
that the page content be ignored by search engines, except for links,
which should be followed. But I would not be sure at all that it works.

Search engines generally go past splash pages if they have real links
(as opposite to e.g. link-like constructs powered by JavaScript). So you
don't really need to do anything special. But omitting the splashing
would improve the situation.

 

[Tim W]

Splash pages will hardly do any good. Users will lose interest fast.


You can exclude it, and that way you would vote against yourself.
Links pointing to your site would point to a page that tells search
engines not to index it. What will they think about that?

You could use <meta name=robots content="noindex, follow">, suggesting
that the page content be ignored by search engines, except for links,
which should be followed. But I would not be sure at all that it works.

Search engines generally go past splash pages if they have real links
(as opposite to e.g. link-like constructs powered by JavaScript). So
you don't really need to do anything special. But omitting the
splashing would improve the situation.

Okay, thanks, I understand better.

Splash Pages: SEO is just not the main priority for a lot of sites, and
this is one of them. I may as well get it right if I can but the site is
absolutely not designed around attracting hits from casual visitors via
google. It is more important here to convey the right impression to a
small number of serious enquiries.

tim W