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(I cannot / will not post the link to the site in question.)
Is it only one page in there, or is the interior page ranking and the homepage isn't?
If you are talking about redirection, nothing illegal in that! - only if it will work in the SEs! Google wants it's users to go to a page for which they have read the snippet, title, and other info for in the SERP, rather than some other page. It would not be in google's interest to do that, and if they could, they would probably eliminate the listing. The key question for SEO's is "if they could". Often its a compromise between guessing and more importantly, whether google would be able to do it soon, and most important of all, whether it will cause a general flag of your site that may cause google to delve deeper and/or apply penalties or bans.
I had a similair problem a few weeks ago where the page that was in the SERPs for "widgets" was not the first impression that I wanted to give the customer. I ended up putting an IFRAME advertisement on that page that led the customer to what they really wanted.
You could also use a pop-up, but that's just gives bad user experience.
I had the same problem of Google ranking two extremely narrowly focused pages above a page that I had designed specifically to appeal to the full range of a rather broad keyword. I compared the three pages to see why the more narrowly focused ones did better, reoptimized the more broadly focused page with what I learned and now the page I wanted people to see has replaced one of my narrowly focused pages as #2 without losing my #3.
And I learned a lot that I can now apply to my other optimizing as well.
The key of course, is that if people go to your site from faulty information in a referred link and description, they are less likely to be qualified buyers or longer term brand lotal customers of your site.
Unless of course you are just looking for one-time traffic and people clicking on your affiliate links. I hear it works but dont know anything about that side of web publishing!
IMO you are far better to go with the flow rather than try to micromanage how people view your site. Simply provide solid navigational tools and prominent links to any critical information the user will eventually need, and let them sell themselves on your product.
In that type of case, of inbound links are to the homepage the whole PR gets messed up.
I don't mind surfers landing inside my page, but I really want them to hit my entrance page. I definitely do not want to use robots.txt to block indexing... I want all the hits I can get to anywhere I can get them. Can I redirect all of these to my entrance page without worrying about someone at Google banning my site?
From your answers so far, it seems that this is ok.
I personally have a tendency to be too low-key and roundabout in my posts, so let me rephrase my previous reply: Do not do this..
Whan that happens to me, I hit the back button. It sure doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Its just very curious why you want to redirect people looking for content to a page that you say has no/minimal content. It makes it hard for us to understand and therefore make recommendations.
Bottom line. Any listings in Google that land people on a different page than what the google description suggests is a key target for any refinements google is doing. How you will get visitors to convert when they go to a pplace they didnt ask for and therefore does not match their reason for going there, I guess, is your problem.
Pretty splash pages can be used for off-line promotions in certain industries, but they're not viable for purposes of search engine traffic. A good part of their value is for the ego of the graphic artist, to be perfectly honest. Which is OK if it's a firm selling graphic design services, but not for an ecom site. Ego doesn't necessarily convert to sales.
You could use a JS redirect - which is imho a "sneaky redirect" - and from a practical standpoint, the searcher was expecting the page she found at the search engine and will be getting something else. The average person won't, but folks like me will assume you're hiding something and go digging to see what's actually in your source code if that happens.
If interior pages are ranking well, it sounds to me like you're looking a gift horse in the mouth and asking for unnecessary complications.
