Index Page Design and Search Engine Ranking

[Maflu]

Hello,
I have a small Flash animation on my home page so that I designed an
index page containing a script detecting whether the visitors have
Flash. If they have it, they are sent to the Flash homepage and if they
do not have it they are sent to another version of the homepage without
Flash animation.

My question is this: because my index page contains nothing else than a
detecting script, will it be a problem for search engine ranking? Or
should I be better off with a "normal" index page containing text and
keywords and so on? How important is the index page as far as ranking
in seach engines is concerned?

Thank you for your help

Cheers

Ted

 

[Kris]

I have a small Flash animation on my home page so that I designed an
index page containing a script detecting whether the visitors have
Flash. If they have it, they are sent to the Flash homepage and if they
do not have it they are sent to another version of the homepage without
Flash animation.

My question is this: because my index page contains nothing else than a
detecting script, will it be a problem for search engine ranking? Or
should I be better off with a "normal" index page containing text and
keywords and so on? How important is the index page as far as ranking
in seach engines is concerned?

If the connectivity to other pages rely on Flash or client side
scripting, SE spiders will not be able to reach them. If, on top of it,
that index page does not have relevant content, then you cannot expect
to see much of your site in search results.

 

[Sid Ismail]

: Hello,
: I have a small Flash animation on my home page so that I designed an
: index page containing a script detecting whether the visitors have
: Flash.

Bad.

: If they have it, they are sent to the Flash homepage

Bad

: and if they
: do not have it they are sent to another version of the homepage without
: Flash animation.

Hope they don't

:
: My question is this: because my index page contains nothing else than a
: detecting script, will it be a problem for search engine ranking?

Yes

: Or
: should I be better off with a "normal" index page containing text and
: keywords and so on?

Of course.

: How important is the index page as far as ranking
: in seach engines is concerned?

Most important - priority 1.

:
: Thank you for your help


Get rid of Flash

Sid

 

[Daniel R. Tobias]

I have a small Flash animation on my home page so that I designed an
index page containing a script detecting whether the visitors have
Flash. If they have it, they are sent to the Flash homepage and if they
do not have it they are sent to another version of the homepage without
Flash animation.

This is likely to cause many accessibility problems in addition to
search engine indexing issues... for instance, if this depends on a
client-side script, any users who have disabled scripting probably won't
wind up anywhere but a blank page. Thus, at a bare minimum, you ought
to have a plain text link on the page to let people go on into the site
if the script fails.