Googlebot + Meta-Refresh
-
Quick question, can Googlebot (or other search engines) follow meta refresh tags? Does it work anything like a 301 in terms of passing value to the new page?
-
Sorry to say we're digging in the crates here... but one of the companies we acquired and took over full ownership of in May of this year had a site with no htaccess in standard html. I went meta refresh for my redirects.
I'm thinking if I verify the site in WMT and then acknowledge that is has been moved to our current domain, this should probably be the most legit way to inform GOOG that we made the move.
If anyone has any feedback that is more up to date, I'd love to hear it. Thanks!
-
Right. Meta-refresh was a common black hat technique for redirecting back in the late 90s and early 2000s so it has a bit of a stigma associated with it.
-
The best information I can find on the subject is 3 years old and from Yahoo.
My understanding is do a 301 if you can, if not do a meta refresh preferably with 0.
Also in 2007, Matt Cutts said this:
Matt Cutts: In general, Google does a relatively good job of following the 301s, and 302s, and even Meta Refreshes and JavaScript. Typically what we don't do would be to follow a chain of redirects that goes through a robots.txt that is itself forbidden.
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml
Based on that discussion it is inferred that value is passed along.
-
Meta Refresh can pass link juice, according to Matt Cutts:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml
But as Ryan Purkey suggests, a 301 is the accepted best-practice here. With Meta Refresh you need to be careful to avoid looking like a black-hat to a picky google algorithm. Some more discussion here.
-
I fully understand that the 301 is the best option, i was interested if it had been published anywhere that meta-refreshes could pass any value or not?
I did some searching around and couldn't find any trust worthy articles. They only thing i found was that it wasn't suggested by SEOMoz and the W3C doesn't support it...
-
Search engines can read meta refresh, but the the standard practice for passing value is a 301 redirect as meta refresh can have other uses while a 301 is specifically for permanent redirection. Use the 301 if you want to pass value.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Meta robots
Hi, I am checking a website for SEO and I've noticed that a lot of pages from the blog have the following meta robots: meta name="robots" content="follow" Normally these pages should be indexed, since search engines will index and follow by default. In this case however, a lot of pages from this blog are not indexed. Is this because the meta robots is specified, but only contains follow? So will search engines only index and follow by default if there is no meta robots specified at all? And secondly, if I would change the meta robots, should I just add index or remove the meta robots completely from the code? Thanks for checking!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How long does it take for google to update my meta tag des?
Hi Guys: I have 3 top level domains, basically - I can see that my website is ranking in another country (USA) for my keyword - however the domain name that is showing up for the USA search is correct, but the meta tag description is incorrect, this meta tag description is for the NZ domain - not the USA domain. I have updated the hreflang tags, when i submit my new sitemap how long does it take google to update the meta tag description? new
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
meta robots no follow on page for paid links
Hi I have a page containing paid links. i would like to add no follow attribute to these links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda
but from technical reasons, i can only place meta robots no follow on page level (
is that enough for telling Google that the links in this page are paid and and to prevent Google penlizling the sites that the page link to? Thanks!0 -
Meta NOINDEX and links into the pages?
If I have internal links pointing to pages that are META NO INDEX, will Google still index them? Or does that only apply to pages that are linked to from an external domain? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Meta tag description Usage
Do i wanna put meta tags as separate description that is not in the particular web page ,Normally i put meta description as 155 character from first paragraph of the web page .so do i need put a unique meta description ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Lots of incorrect urls indexed - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site
Hi, Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Basically, our rankings and traffic etc have been dropping massively recently google sent us a message stating " Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site". This first highligted us to the problem that for some reason our eCommerce site has recently generated loads (potentially thousands) of rubbish urls hencing giving us duplication everywhere which google is obviously penalizing us with in the terms of rankings dropping etc etc. Our developer is trying to find the route cause of this but my concern is, How do we get rid of all these bogus urls ?. If we use GWT to remove urls it's going to take years. We have just amended our Robot txt file to exclude them going forward but they have already been indexed so I need to know do we put a redirect 301 on them and also a HTTP Code 404 to tell google they don't exist ? Do we also put a No Index on the pages or what . what is the best solution .? A couple of example of our problems are here : In Google type - site:bestathire.co.uk inurl:"br" You will see 107 results. This is one of many lot we need to get rid of. Also - site:bestathire.co.uk intitle:"All items from this hire company" Shows 25,300 indexed pages we need to get rid of Another thing to help tidy this mess up going forward is to improve on our pagination work. Our Site uses Rel=Next and Rel=Prev but no concanical. As a belt and braces approach, should we also put concanical tags on our category pages whereby there are more than 1 page. I was thinking of doing it on the Page 1 of our most important pages or the View all or both ?. Whats' the general consenus ? Any advice on both points greatly appreciated? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Canonical Meta Tag
Can someone explain how this works and how necessary is it? For example, I have a new client, who is ranking WITHOUT the www in their domain, but they have a good deal of backlinks already that have www in it. When I set up google webmaster tools I made 2, one for WWW and one for WITHOUT and there are diffenet numbers of backlinks for each. I have no idea what do about this or if I should even do anything. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGrid0 -
Best SEO META Description for forum topics
What would be the best SEO META Description tag for forum topics on a forum type website? I can think of a few options so far Snippet of first post. Title of the topic with templated trailing text Remove description tag completely Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640