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
-
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Googlebot on steroids... Why?
We launched a new website (www.gelderlandgroep.com). The site contains 500 pages, but some pages (like https://www.gelderlandgroep.com/collectie/) contains filters (so there are a lot possible url parameters). Last week we mentioned a tremendous amount of traffic (25 GB!!) and CPU usage on the server. 2017-12-04 16:11:57 W3SVC66 IIS14 83.219.93.171 GET /collectie model=6511,6901,7780,7830,2105-illusion&ontwerper=henk-vos,foklab 443 - 66.249.76.153 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/5.0+(Linux;+Android+6.0.1;+Nexus+5X+Build/MMB29P)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/41.0.2272.96+Mobile+Safari/537.36+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html) - - www.gelderlandgroep.com 200 0 0 9445 501 312 We find out that "Googlebot" was firing many, many requests. At first we did a nslookup for the IPadres where it actually seems to be googlebot. Second we visited Google Searchconsole and I was really surprised... Googlebot on steroids? Googlebot requested 922.565 different url's and made combinations for every filter/ parameter combination on the site. Why? The sitemap.xml contains 500 url's... The authority of the site isn't very high, no other signal that this is a special website... Why so much "Google resources"? Of course we will exclude the parameters in SearchConsole, but I never saw a Googlebot activity for a small website like this before! Does anybody have any clue? Regards Olaf searchconsole.png nslookup.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Olaf0 -
Tools to test meta descriptions?
Hey does anyone know of any tools which can test your meta descriptions against competitors meta descriptions for specific keyword terms. I know one tool called SERP Turkey which uses mechanical turk, i was wondering if there is any others on the market? Even a tool which can automatically score your meta description against others on the SERP results page. E..g optimised, keyword, call to action, etc. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Utf-8 symbols in the Title or Meta Description?
Has somebody any experience (pros or cons) to using utf-8 symbols in the Title or in the Meta Description tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yosef
Expedia uses it:
http://prntscr.com/74ofrv 74ofrv0 -
How to add Geo Meta Tags, Dublin Core, Microformats in Word press website?
Please let me know how to add and what to include in Geo Meta Tags, Dublin Core, Microformats.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Why google index some meta titles I dont have?
Hi there, I have a problem with a website and I am desperate to find a solution because I have tried many things and nothing works! My website its: adtriboo.com Google does not find my main URL (main countro spain) www.adtriboo.com/es and I dont see this page its indexed in google. See link https://www.google.es/search?num=100&hl=es&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Aadtriboo.com&oq=site%3Aadtriboo.com&gs_l=hp.3...1189.4419.0.4586.17.17.0.0.0.0.223.1457.9j6j1.16.0...0.0...1c.1.8.hp.brTKX-zPwVI Also, google its showing some meta titles that are not in my page! For example my subfolder for the country Chile shows this title: Chile - Adtriboo but this its my real title Diseño logo, logotipos, video corporativo - adtriboo In webmaster tools everything looks good, and if I explore the webpage like google in webmaster tools the code its ok and everything lookd okay. If you see for example the URL from Chile (www.adtriboo.com/es_CL) the meta title is not the right one! Also i have a problem indexatión because i am not visible for any of my keywords even in the page 10! Please, somebody knows what happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Comunicare0 -
Why specify robots instead of googlebot for a Panda affected site?
Daniweb is the poster child for sites that have recovered from Panda. I know one strategy she mentioned was de-indexing all of her tagged content, fo rexample: http://www.daniweb.com/tags/database Why do you think more Panda affected sites specifying 'googlebot' rather than 'robots' to capture traffic from Bing & Yahoo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0