Warning Page Affecting Indexing

Need Design Advice For Warning Page

[Richland]

Since our warning page is our first page it is the index page. Our links on the warning page go to organizations that protect children and the only link to our site is the one that takes you to our home page. Sorry if I may be using the wrong terms but I am new to this. The site is loaded with original, useful content. Any ideas on how we can get our others pages spidered by the search engines.

All suggestions will be appreciated.

[moose606]

A little fuzzy on what you mean by a warning page and is this your home(or index.html) page. Anyway, do you know anyone else with an existing website? If so, then just ask them if they will place a link on their site to your home page. Once the search engines find your site, they will begin to crawl it.

[Richland]

Sorry, that I did not explain myself better. The site has sexual information on it presented in a very moral way. Lets get this straight, we are not a porn site so I hope this post is okay. We are not required to have a warning page but choose to do so.

The warning page gives the person a choice of links, one link for 18 and over takes them to our site, and the other links to a non-profit organization that provides the same type of information but addressed to teens.

As far as links, we have received a number of links from major, quality companies in our industry, sites with excellent PR, even so, as far as Google seems to be concerned, we do not have any links (but this is another issue). The links that we do have go to our warning page. If we bypassed the warning page this would defeat our purpose of giving a warning so how do we get around that?

We have only been online about 4 months and at least as far as Alexa is concerned, during the past couple of weeks our traffic has been ranking near or even ahead of some sites in our field that are operated by people with big bucks including television. Our own statistics show that we are growing rapidly even though we spend no money on advertising. Naturally we do not want to make changes that would mess the present growth up. We do want search engine traffic so we need some type of balance. Any additional advice would be appreciated. By the way, the we is me and the mouse in my back pocket!

[Beagle]

A couple of pretty basic things:

Be sure that the link from the warning page to your site is HTML (no flash, etc.) so all spiders will be able to read it.

Inside your site, have a sitemap that links to every page on your site.

And one comment - Of course, if the spiders do start crawling your entire site and indexing more pages, you're going to have people entering through those pages. It sounds like you want to avoid that.

[Richland]

Thank you for the reply. Yes, I would like to try to avoid people entering without seeing a warning. While I am sure few people would find the site offensive, I am a parent myself and would not want my preteen children visiting the site.

[sharbel]

You could have a script that checks if the User's Sesion has seen the warning page, if not, redirect them to the warning page...