Mod_pagespeed lazy load meta redirects, is it a problem?

[Fammy]

Google's mod_pagespeed has a lazy image loading facility which is great, but it uses meta refresh to auto disable itself for people without javascript and the moz crawler says it is not good for seo, but we are not using them for that, example code

<noscript><meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;url='http://www.example.com/?ModPagespeed=noscript'" /><style><!--table,div,span,font,p{display:none} --></style><div style="display:block">Please click <a href="http://www.example.com/?ModPagespeed=noscript">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div></noscript>

Will this cause SEO problems? If not then is there anyway to filter the warnings out of moz, it finds this issue with every page

[Fammy]

Yeah it would be frustrating if we got penalised for a meta tag a google module had added! If you can get crawl error filtering added to the wishlist for that that's be great

thanks for your time

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I'm going to be honest and say I'm not exactly sure of the SEO implications (and I bet most engineers at Google wouldn't be either) but my best gut-check guess says the impact is minimal.

Because the page redirects back to itself - only with a modified parameter, an easy defense against loss of authority would be to make sure every page had a self-referential canoncial tag on it, so that both of these URLs...

• http://www.example.com/?ModPagespeed=noscript
• http://www.example.com/?ModPagespeed=on&ModPagespeedFilters=lazyload_images

... had the same canonical tag that pointed to http://www.example.com/  (no parameters)

This way, no matter how Google might dilute authority through redirects, all the authority is directed at the same URL. Not sure if this is all technically necessary, but I don't see how it could hurt.

As to your other question, unfortunately we don't have a way to turn off crawl warnings in Moz Analytics, but it's an often requested feature so it may be something we consider in the future.

Cheers!

[Fammy]

Thanks for the response. We are currently experimenting with alternatives to mod_pagespeed for other reasons so I can't send a reliable example as we experimenting, but google have one of their own http://www.modpagespeed.com/lazyload_images.html?ModPagespeed=on&ModPagespeedFilters=lazyload_images

<noscript></span><span><meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;url='http://www.modpagespeed.com/lazyload_images.html?ModPagespeed=noscript'" /><style><!--table,div,span,font,p{display:none} --></style><div style="display:block">Please click <a href="http://www.modpagespeed.com/lazyload_images.html?ModPagespeed=noscript">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div></span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></noscript>

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Could you give me an example of a page? I'm curious to see. Feel free to private message me if you wish.

General thoughts: Meta refreshes are an interesting topic. Typically they haven't been good for SEO (Google has even considered them spam in the past) but in recent years Google has made veiled comments that Meta refreshes are useful and even desirable in certain circumstances.

So all-in-all I wouldn't be too worried about from an SEO point of view.

Unfortunately, there's no way to remove it from the Moz report notifications. It's still best practice not to use Meta Refresh, hence we include it in the global report.