If you change what you show based on whether the user-agent is a bot, search engines consider that cloaking and may ban you from their indices entirely.

It depends on what you're asking, Jason. The way in which interstitial pages would impact SEO is generally related to the backlink profile.

If external links are to the final page after the interstitial, then the PageRank flow would be directly to the target page and the interstitial wouldn't factor all all.

If the page has a redirect on it then sends the visitor to the interstitial first, then any links to the page won't count for PageRank value because you're redirecting that value away to that interstitial.

Similarly, if links are to an intro page that leads to the interstitial and then to the content page, then the PageRank value wouldn't flow to the final content page.

The reason is that interstitial pages generally use something like a meta refresh to send the visitor to the final content page (or require the visitor to click a link to get there). And neither method would flow PageRank value from external links.

But just the presence of interstitial pages on a site won't impact search rankings if the search engines are able to rank the final content pages without involving the interstitials. This, of course, means that traffic from search acquisition would have a workflow that leads directly from the search results page to the final content page and would bypass the interstitial. If that workflow doesn't fit your needs, then you may have issues.
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