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
-
Why isn't our complete meta title showing up in the Google SERPS? (cut off half way)
We carry a product line, cutless bearings (for use on boats). For instance, we have one, called the Able, that has the following meta title (and searched by View Page Source to confirm): BOOT 1-3/8" x 2-3/8" x 5-1/2" Johnson Cutless Bearing | BOOT Cutlass However, if I search for it on on Google by part number or name (boot cutless bearing, boot cutlass bearing), the meta title comes back with whole first part chopped off, only showing this : "x 5-1/2" Johnson Cutless Bearing | BOOT Cutlass - Citimarine ..." Any idea why? Here's the url if it will hopefully help: https://citimarinestore.com/en/metallic-inches/156-boot-johnson-cutless-bearing-870352103.html All the products in the category are doing the same. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citimarine0 -
New meta description limit?
Hi guys is the new meta description limit something temporary - Google just testing or can we assume it will remain moving forward? Just wondering if i should increase my meta description limit to 300 characters for all my sites. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
Mobile Meta Descriptions?
Hi Guys, We have two different versions of each page for both desktop and mobile example: http://tinyurl.com/zkxlxax http://tinyurl.com/zelqcbv We want to create meta descriptions for both versions. However in the CMS (http://www.mantistech.com.au/ecommerce_website_package.aspx) it only allows one meta description. Example: http://s21.postimg.org/ar8bzrh3r/screenshot_1804.jpg Does anyone know anyway around this? To add two different meta descriptions and tell Google which one to use based on device type. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Is it okay to copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag?
I have heard conflicting answers to this. I always figured that it was okay to selectively copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag.....especially if the onpage content is well written. How can it be duplicate content if it's pulling from the exact same page? Does anybody have any feedback from a credible source about this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications1 -
Is it a bad idea to use our meta description as a short description of a product on that product page?
Does this count as duplicating content even though the meta description has no effect on search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | USAMM0 -
Should I remove all meta descriptions to avoid duplicates as a short term fix?
I’m currently trying to implement Matt Cutt’s advice from a recent YouTube video, in which he said that it was better to have no meta descriptions at all than duplicates. I know that there are better alternatives, but, if forced to make a choice, would it be better to remove all duplicate meta descriptions from a site than to have duplicates (leaving a lone meta tag description on the home page perhaps?). This would be a short term fix prior to making changes to our CMS to allow us to add unique meta descriptions to the most important pages. I’ve seen various blogs across the internet which recommend removing all the tags in these circumstances, but I’m interested in what people on Moz think of this. The site currently has a meta description which is duplicated across every page on the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0