There is another kind of work that a website needs to do (which is also hindered by the use of a splash page). A website needs to be friendly to search engines so that it will be easier for people to find your site. Getting traffic is an incredibly important part of using your site effectively. Specifically search engine traffic can be a valuable benefit to having a website. But a splash page can actually camouflage your site from search engines. To extend the visit analogy, not only does a splash page bombard a visitor upon their arrival, but they also make it hard to find the house in the first place. Again a splash page fights against the effective use of your site.

Splash pages tend to be built using Flash. Flash is an excellent technology, but it's very limited in terms of its ability to be indexed by search engines. Therefore if your main, default web page is a splash page with a Flash animation, a search engine will see exactly nothing. At best it might see the "skip intro" link, assuming of course that this link is not contained in the Flash animation as well. Some splash pages use a technical technique called meta refreshing. This simple JavaScript code tells the splash page to open a new window after a few seconds or advance automatically to the home page after a few seconds. Because porn sites use this trick in extremely invasive ways, most search engines not only fail to follow such links, but they might actually drop a site using this technique in fear that it would lead to inappropriate content.   next >