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Splash pages vs landing pages on eCommerce site?

What is better for SEO: landing pages or splash pages

onlinesource

7:09 pm on Mar 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

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I currently use Magento 1.9.2 for my store. I have some pages that I created using a Splash page generator that are not ranking. From what I've read, Splash pages are BAD for SEO but landing pages are good.

I know in theory a landing page lets viewers know everything they need to know or want to know about something, to convert sales. A splash page is more or "Are you 21 years or old? If so CLICK HERE" on beer pages, right?

BUT if something labeled as a splash page has the content of a landing page, meaning links to articles, content, good material, etc does Google see it as a landing page or still as a splash page and so, is it ignored?

When I view my splash page source code, I can see <body class=" attributesplash-group-view splash-group-3"> so I assume that Googlebot knows it is a splash page. Will moving all of this splash page content to landing pages help the content rank better? Right now not a single splash page I have made shows up in Google search results. Does Googlebot simply filter all splash pages?

tangor

7:14 pm on Mar 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

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I can't answer your question as to what g does, but I do have a thought regarding splash pages in general: it is one more click between the user and the content ... even if the content is presented on the splash page. I'd drop it ... and your empirical evidence suggests your already know how those pages are valued (or NOT valued).

lucy24

8:50 pm on Mar 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

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<begin boilerplate>

Splash pages are BAD for SEO

Never mind SEO. Splash pages are bad for humans, which means SEO is irrelevant unless you can say that suchandsuch is very, very good for SEO-- so good that it outweighs the real-life disadvantages. (Another place I see this a lot is in discussions of image alt text. Mercifully there are not that many situations where something is terrible for SEO and wonderful for humans, or vice versa.)
</boilerplate>

Andy Langton

10:24 pm on Mar 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

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I can see <body class=" attributesplash-group-view splash-group-3"> so I assume that Googlebot knows it is a splash page.

It's very unlikely that a CSS class name is the source of any ranking issue.

Marshall

11:05 pm on Mar 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

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Splash rhymes with Trash, IMHO.

lucy24

12:27 am on Mar 10, 2016 (gmt 0)

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It's very unlikely that a CSS class name is the source of any ranking issue.

Not the name, as such,* if you mean its lexical meaning. But if a given class name is known to be used by any common CMS, then surely any search engine worth its salt will know exactly what the class name means--functionally--and evaluate it accordingly.

* I once reviewed an ebook written in Esperanto. The maker saw fit to use Esperanto for all his classnames as well. Fun!

Andy Langton

3:27 pm on Mar 10, 2016 (gmt 0)

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then surely any search engine worth its salt will know exactly what the class name means--functionally--and evaluate it accordingly

It would potentially make sense - but I've never seen any evidence for it (outside of blueline.jpg type incidents!).

I think part of the difficulty is the breadth of systems out there. IS there any real chance that Google detects the classes from a Magento plugin with a few hundred or few thousand installs?

Similarly, if you look at "ported" themes, plugins, etc. the class names are often the opposite of meaningful.

Perhaps search engines might maintain a small-ish listed of definitively meaningful class names, but I'm sceptical. Even with class names like "SEO_KEYWORDS" and "hidden" I've never seen anything approaching conclusive.