: Would a video have an effect on SEO if first time visitors to the homepage must watch it before seeing the content? Plan is to have a video splash-page to showcase a product so that when

@Cugini213

The video would only play the first time a user visits the site.


This is impossible to determine, deleted cookies, other PC, phone and "would play" means starts automatically? That's a no-go.

When researching I preopen a lot of tabs and those that start some video get kicked out immediately. It is my decission when I want to watch it.

You can offer the video area and below two buttons (Play video) and (Skip video), or make the content start right below it with a responsive design.

SEO measures how much content (real content!) you have and how good it is. The video is no part of this calculation and even with a high SEO rank you might still lose a lot of visitors just because you annoy them.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Jamie184

A video in-of-itself is not a bad thing.

However, the notion of hijacking the user experience by auto-starting the video and restricting access to the content is a bad thing. It is extremely bad.

Listen, these days UX (user experience) is everything. Smart SEOs understand that bounce rates, time on site, number of pages read, time on page, are all metrics directly tied to the user experience. Do not mess it up.

Okay. Have the video. But DO NOT auto-start the video! And do not restrict users from your content.

Here is another secret. There are two kinds of people searching on the web: the short attention span entertain me now video viewers, twitter followers, texters; and the ones who want information that can be digested. People who are researching on the web will want to read and digest your content, not watch a video, though they may do that as well. The point is, anyone who is researching will gather information in the most efficient manner and that is reading, skimming, browsing, cut and paste for comparison or note taking, and so on. You cannot do these things with videos. I realize that videos were/may still be all the rage. When YouTube became popular and huge, everybody and their grandmother went out and made a video. Fine. But when companies did this, they found that videos did not always suffice and that good ol' fashion content was better. Videos help and are okay. But they are not a replacement for what most people really want to do- that is digest information.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Welton855

Why don't you just put the video in a <div> which floats on top of the content. You can always dim the rest of the page while the video plays. The search engine will still read all the content on the page and just see that there is a <div> which floats on top.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Smith883

No. There is no way for search engines to read the content of a video. As far as SEO goes, search engines will see this: <video></video> or similar.

SEO will not be helped by using a video splash screen.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Bryan171

nobody likes splashscreens, I strongly advise you make any video a choice, even autoplay is annoying.


It is not accessible
There is no (reliable) way to make it only show once
It will increase the bounce rate even for people who haven't seen it before
On slow machines your site may be unusable
and yes slow pages are ranked lower. (this will be a problem even if the content in the video is replicated on the site)


Also you question suggests that there is content in the video that wouldn't be also included in the site. If that is the case that would dramatically harm SEO as content exclusively in the video would not be indexed at all.

Vote Up Vote Down