splash pages

[tramtwo]

Is having this splash (http://www.aquaticconstruction.com/) page for this site, (http://www.aquaticconstruction.com/main.php) preventing search engines from crawling the rest of the site?

[oink]

I don't know if the flash hurts by itself, but you are seriously lacking in plain text relating to the theme of your site. Some engines key in on that and you have none. Nice eye appealing site though. Can't you make the waterfall actually run as opposed to just the water script. The two together would be very cool.

[renegade600]

Yes they do, there is not much there to direct the search into the actual site. If you want to read more about this, search google using "splash pages and search engines" as keywords.

[tramtwo]

Thanks for the help. So what is it that can be done? Does the spalsh page need to be eleminated?

[renegade600]

Personally, I do not believe splash screens belongs on a commercial site. However, to make it work, maybe have more navigation from it.

[Steven.Bentley]

ditto, I'm no fan of splash screens either

[tramtwo]

Thanks, the splash screen is on the way out.

I have heard that google has or is in the process of changing the way they rank sites, giving preference to .org and eductional sites. The way that I understand it is that no one really knows what the search engines are looking for and that the guys in the SEO biz are lost. Do I have it wrong?

[renegade600]

You are right, there is no way of knowing how the rankings will be handled in the different search engines. However, imo, the search engines are looking at profit instead of help. That is why alot of them have paid advertisng on their pages. They don't want you to find what you are looking for too soon and want you to stay in their site as long as possible.

[tramtwo]

After a bit more digging. I have found that the site in question is useing session ids. And that this is the "main" problem causing the site not to be indexed.

I really don't know much about this stuff... grasping at straws really. Does anyone have any sources I could check out? Also surely there has to be a work around the session id problem... if in fact it is a problem.

[Steven.Bentley]

I think the problem with sessions is where they're on the end of the URL, it means that the same page has an almost infinite number of URLs, and the URL that google spiders will have disappeared because the session will have expired.

[tramtwo]

Thanks.

So where or how does one go about the correction of this?