Meta refresh bad for SEO
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Hi there,
Some external developers have created a wishlist for a website that allows visitors to add products to a wishlist and then send an enquiry. Very similar set-up to a shopping basket really (without the payment option). However, this wishlist lives in a separate iframe and refreshes every 30 seconds to reflect any items visitors add to their wishlist. This refreshing is done with a meta refresh.
I'm aware of the obvious usability issue that the visitor's product only appears after 30 seconds in their wishlist. However, are there also any SEO issues due to the refreshing of the iframe every 30 seconds?
Please let me know, whether small or large issues.
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Live sites will get badly damaged if such this happens. Consider the cases of Sports live score sites, Online chat frames, News feeds, etc. So mostly this won't damage the SEO factors.
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Are the wishlist pages even crawlable? Are the contents in the iFrames crawlable? If it's something that can only be accessed after a login, I wouldn't worry about it. That is, beside the fact that iFrames are gross.
But if the wishlist pages can be crawled, it's just an iFrame on the page. Though googlebot can crawl iFrames. Since the meta refresh is so long, it's not going to be treated as a 301. On the (very low) chance that someone links to the dynamic URL behind the iFrame, any link juice/power/juju/hutzpah will be lost.
I imagine that dynamic URL would be somewhere out of reach, other than from the iFrame. If the dynamic URLs are accessible to bots, and something like clientsite.com/bob-wishlist&asd09af8aws9pe8afujpeaf... that could be a problem, because it will probably generate a lot of crawl errors for the site. Though you can tell the various Webmaster Tools to avoid whatever parameter in the URLs, should such be the case.
So basically, you could run into crawling issues. All of those related to crawl budget. Andy's AJAX suggestion would be a safer bet, should you run into issues with the iFrame/meta refresh method. Just make sure to tell the various Webmaster Tools/Search Consoles/Diddle-Dad-Joes to avoid indexing URLs with whatever flavor of URL parameter used to serve the dynamic content.
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Hi Micha,
I can't think of why Google might object to this as it isn't the page that is refreshing constantly. That said, iFrames are frowned upon from a SEO standpoint as there have been many issues with blackhat techniques in the past.
To me, I would be looking at how big the iFrame is, where it is on the page, is it every page, what content is contained in there - the usability might harm your SEO in a roundabout way though.
At best, it will do nothing to your SEO - at worst, it could cause issues.
Would you not be able to achieve what you are wanting to do by using Ajax or similar?
-Andy
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