4Q Survey Effect on Indexation?

[Michael Whitehouse]

I was wondering if anyone has tested the affects of the survey on native site indexation? Specifically, since the survey appears at X rate, does Googlebot pick it up at specific times when it's crawling the site and regard it as a barrier to the native site?

If the following link is for the survey, then I am seeing that Google is picking up the survey invites in their index, but there are only around 156.

http://4qinvite.4q.iperceptions.com/1.aspx?sdfc=07714f49-246-d83a61...

Thoughts? I can test myself, but won't see the results for days...

mvalentine
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mvalentine: Great question. From what we've seen in live environments with our enterprise level clients using either the layered invitation or the older, redirect technology, neither Google or any other major search is actually indexing those interstitial pages.

In general, I don't think the search bots actually crawl interstitial pages, or if they do, they smartly filter them out. For example, look at Forbes.com. When you navigate there, you are frequently presented with the following welcome screen with a Dell ad asset: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml. However, when I Google "Forbes.com," this page doesn't appear in the organic search results.

If anyone knows more about the indexing of interstitials, please feel free to jump in.

Hope this helps!
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It shouldn't affect the search bots or indexing at all since you are serving the same html to the search engines. The survey is simply another layer written to the page with JavaScript (correct me if I'm wrong) during page load. The search bots generally don't index JS content.

This is a similar situation to Google's Website Optimizer, which simply shows different variations of content (on page load) to your visitors so that you can see which variation performs the best.

Google have said is fine as long as you aren't trying to deceive your visitors with completely different content than they would expect to find on your site.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=72507
http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

marcom

[Rob]

Marcom and the other "replior" are correct. Search bots effectively ignore javascript. Only a person in physical form with a pair of eyes will actually see the survey overlay layer. The Search bot will have already indexed the markup and content of the page by the time any virtual popup appears (if at all for a bot). Also,the content of the survey layer message should never appear in your site's indexed pages since it exists dynamically only in the linked javascript (bots ignore the JS).

-Rob

[Michael Whitehouse]

Thanks for the added insight, Rob.