I have a script on my site www.circuitz4u.com that redirects visitors to the intro page the first time they view the site (using PHP). I was wondering if this will negatively affect my PR? Does annybody know?
only 301 redirects won't hurt you in SEs. Anything other than that (meta-refresh, 302 etc) are a big no-no.
Depends on how you are identifying a user as a first time visitor, if it is by cookie then the spider will be pushed to the redirect each time as they typically dont store cookies. If the first time visit page is just a rubbish ads page then it will impact your PR, if it is keyword rich etc then no it shouldnt. you could change your script as not to redirect spiders if you are concerned.
No, they won't decrease your PageRank. ESPECIALLY if you use a 301 redirect, since the redirect follows the user (and PR) from the old page to the new page. Also, just so you know, 301 redirects are permanent redirects. 302s are temporary.
Yeah I am using cookies, so you mean the spider won't be able to get to the other pages? I think I will remove the script then.
certainly the older spiders couldnt store cookies but dont know for certain if this has changed since then. If they havent then google will only be able to see the redirected landing page. You can modify your script to use a session variable in addition to the cookie so if either exists then the redirect doesnt happen.
If it uses php, and presumably cookies to see if the user is new, then chances are, every time a search engine visits it would be seen as a new visit, so would always get redirected. I would do the redirection via js, or get a list of search engine ip's or search engine user agents, and only redirect if a new visitor & not in the ip list/user agents list.