Golf Handicap Site SEO ??

[bubba]

I have a SEO question about a new site I created to calculate your golf handicap.

I want to know if it will hurt my ranking if I have the site structured in the following way.

http://my18holes.com/index.html

This page is the entry page but it checks to see if java script is enabled and then if so it directs you to:

http://my18holes.com/My18Holes.asp

The text content that I want the bots to read is on:
http://my18holes.com/My18Holes.asp

I want to know if this method of entering the site will allow for the bots to crawl the site. Also if there is a better way then I would appreciate any advice.

(A point of clarification) The site functions well with the present configuration but I am interested in making sure that I also have it optimized for the search bots.

Thanks,
b

[Bevin]

In my experience a large percentage of the search engine bots will not follow a javascript redirect. With Google a javascript redirect will trigger a check to see if your using 'cloaking' to serve the search engines different pages than your users. The content on the javascript and non-javascript pages is probably not different enough to trigger a cloaking penalty but you would be much safer serving your no javascript warning on the My18Holes.asp page. If you simply want to redirect all users to that page, I would use a 301 redirect in a .htaccess file.

Converting your links from onclick events to standard links, or using both, would also be something you want to do. Currently there isn’t much in the way of links for a search engine bot to follow. Another thing would be to add meta Description tags to your pages and Alt text to any images that are of importance.

[dpyers]

Why would you name the new entry page My18Holes.asp instead of default.asp?