Splash Page
From HostBaby Wiki
A Splash page is an image or Flash based landing page that appears briefly before you enter a website.. This can be a very cool visitor experience, but it can also hurt your search engine rating.
As far as Search Engines are concerned, splash landing pages are a blindfold to your site's content.
Why Splash Pages Can Hurt Your SEO
Search Engine 'bots' archive and catalog the internet by "spidering" their way through every possible link on the internet and "reading" the text they find.
A good test of whether text on your site is readable to search engine spiders is simply this:
Can you highlight, copy and paste it with your mouse?
If the answer to that is no, then search engine spiders can't read it.
So, any text that is graphical (meaning typed onto an image and then saved as an image file.) or graphically-based (like Flash) is invisible to search engine spiders.
Now, for search engine spiders, the very first page of your site has the most relevance. Most specifically, the text on the first page of your site has the most relevance. If the spiders hit your site and all they see is an empty page with a link to another page, they you are minimizing a golden opportunity to have an impact on search engine results.
For this reason, we recommend you carefully consider how important you feel Search Engines to be to the overall success of your site, and weigh that consideration before deciding whether or not to use a Splash Page.
How To Set Up Your Splash Page
On the Splash Page section you will see the following screen:
- Click your mouse over the dropdown to show a list of the images in your Image Bank. Select one by highlighting it.
- Select how many seconds you want the image to display
- Once selected, hit Submit and your page will be refreshed. You'll know it saved because the yellow 'UPDATED' bar will be visible at the top.
- To disable the splash page, simply choose "None" from the image options and re-save. :)
