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3 years, 2 months ago via Twitter

How do interstitials effect SEO of pages/google rank?

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vanessafox | 3 years, 2 months ago view on twitter
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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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pete smith | 3 years, 2 months ago view on twitter
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In my experience, most of the time search engines like google don't "see" interstitial pages, since they're often done using Flash or some other plugin. Other systems look at the user-agent of the visiting entity and again, if its a search engine, they get routed right around the interstitial.

So interstitials have little-to-no bearing on page rank.
source(s):
Personal experience from developing interstitial ad systems.

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easyeboy | 3 years, 2 months ago view on twitter
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I do not believe they have much affect on Google Page rank or search engine optimization. For instance, Business Week www.businessweek.com is one of my favorite online magazines to check out from time to time and they do this. Its Page Rank is 8, which is pretty good. Although it's not a 10/10, it's still in the top Page Rank. I have seen Business Week articles in the Google searches. So, it would be safe to say that these interstitials have little affect on the search engine ranking. Lots of credible news sources do this.

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thejpl | 3 years, 2 months ago Report

Actually, businessweek uses user agent scripts to bypass the interstitial pages for bots.

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shoemoney | 3 years, 2 months ago view on twitter
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J -

From my experience in using Javascript interstitial its never had any effect on SEO rankings.

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jimmygle | 3 years, 2 months ago view on twitter
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There are methods for detecting whether a client is a search engine bot or not, so I would imagine that most larger sites disable interstitial ads for those bots, so it _can't_ effect SEO.
source(s):
I'm a web developer

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thebigjc | 3 years, 2 months ago view on twitter
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I would be willing to bet that the news sites check to see if it is a spider/bot and choose never to show them interstitial. Yes, this could get them in trouble, but due to the random nature of interstitials, this would never be proven.

Give it a try - set your user agent to Google and see if you get any interstitials.
source(s):
Me

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