Is Forbes' welcome page bad for seo? [closed]

Question

I saw a interesting case in forbes' website. When you enter the website it shows you a page that contains a quote then you click on "continue" button and see the actual page.

Example: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/07/20/the-death-of-seo-the-rise-of-social-pr-and-real-content/

You should be redirected to: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

I check the codes, it uses javascript to redirect. I think it's a good idea to make money, more ctr.

But how does forbes make their website seo friendly by making this?

Answer 1

This is an interstitial ad. In general, they're defined via cookie to not display every single time you visit the site, though the interval is arbitrary. In the case of Forbes, it should only display about once per day, per browser, but some sites opt for every few hours. The practice is common enough that if there were a significant SEO penalty known to come about because of it, you'd assume people would stop doing it. Note in particular that this type of ad is mostly restricted to larger media sites that would absolutely not tolerate a problem caused by it.

While it's known that Googlebot executes "some" Javascript, Google has never provided much detail as to what that might be beyond Ajax functions, so there's necessary speculation. Googlebot does seem to accept (some?) cookies, so if the interstial-checking JS is executed, and the cookie is accepted, then the potential problem you're asking about would only apply to a single page for a 24hr-ish period of crawling. That's likely an acceptable risk for the ad revenue. Remember that Forbes is a well-established site that's going to have many incoming links for pretty much anything of significance, gaining plenty of search benefit that way.

But if the case is that the particular bits of JS relevant to the interstitial do not get executed, the question is moot as Googlebot just never sees the ad. This is easy enough to test by just disabling JS in your browser.

Answer 2

If it's a JavaScript redirect, then I assume Google doesn't see the it.

Since it's Forbes, the anticipated quality of the content is probably high enough that real users don't bounce straight back to Google which would hit their SEO. For that reason, this is a dangerous technique - both for SEO and for general usability.