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Splash Page Misery - Search Engine optimisation (SEO) - Part 2

13/05/2008

Working in the web design industry you come across many different websites, some great sites and some not so great sites but one thing that is sure to hinder your search engine optimasation campaign wether you have an amazing site or anot is a splash page. A splash page is a page that loads when you go to a website but it isn’t the homepage, its a page before, usually with an animation on it and a single button to move onto the homepage of the site.

Splash pages can have a negative effect on your website for two reasons. Namely SEO perspective and usability.

When it comes to SEO your homepage is the strongest page on your website, this is because it should have good indexable content with a clear menu structure that can be spidered easily by search engines. Your inner pages feed from the link juice (page rank) that is taken from your homepage that receives all the links to your site and with a good internal linking structure your site can benefit from this.

When you use a splash page you are effectively robbing your website of its strongest page. Your average splash page will contain no content as its usually an image or some flash and it will only have one link on the page, A worst case scenario is that that one link or redirect that is used to get to your homepage will be embedded in flash which would mean in the eyes of Google your website would consist of 1 page with no content on it. If this was the case Google would not give this page any relevance to any keywords. Even if the link or redirect could be seen by Google and it followed then what should be your best page is now considered as an inner page for the site.

The second negative effect of a splash page is from a Usability point of view. If you are a large corporate web site like a brand such as Adidas or Fred Perry then i would consider this to be less of a problem as your users will probably be there because they know your site and they have not just stumbled across it searching for something. If you are a smaller site then a splash page can be a problem.

When it comes to usability a website has a few short seconds to keep the attention of a user before they hit the back button or they navigate away. Usually a splash page will not provide enough content on the page to keep the users attention. A splash page also makes more work for the user to find the homepage let alone what they came to the website to look for.

So next time you are having a website designed or if you are thinking of a re-design remember these two vital reasons not to have a splash page because with poor SEO and poor usability you could end up with very few users.