Meta refresh bad for SEO
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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 -
Meta Description
Hello, For example let say I do hiking tour in different regions and all my pages are presented the same way with the highlights, hotels, what is included, the price, the level and the dates. I guess that across my pages the meta description is going to be the same, the only thing that is going to change is the destination. Is it ok to do it this way ? I know it isn't recommend to do duplicate but in this type of configuration I have no idea on have to do different meta knowing all the pages present the same things. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Software to Analyse Bad Links
Is it possible to get a pretty good idea of my site's link profile by merging the link data from Google Webmaster Tools, MOZ and SEMRUSH (backlinks). I would think that combining the linking domains from these three packages would create a pretty good profile. Once I create a list of domains that link to my site is it possible to run them thru MOZ so as to evaluate their quality? Last year I paid a reputable SEO firm to run a link analysis, process link removal requests and finally a disavow, only to see my domain authority decline from 33 to 24. So I am leary of the process. That being said I have reviewed the disavow file that was submitted last year and still see about a third of the low quality domains still linking to our site. Alternatively is it worthwhile to run a link detox report. Maybe it is worth biting the bullet and spending the $175.00 dollars to run a report. Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) does not have too many links so maybe I can research this manually. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
Meta Tags (again)
Hey, I know this has been discussed to death but look back through previous postings there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the exact Meta tags that an eCommerce site should include, specifically whether to remove the keyword tag or not since it is believed that Yahoo potentially still makes use of it. Currently our homepage has the following Meta Tags: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" /> Keywords" content="<a class="attribute-value">ink cartridges, cheap cartridges, inkjet cartridges, inkjet ink cartridges, ink cartridge, printer ink cartridges, laser cartridges, toner, laser printers</a>" /> Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/> author" content="<a class="attribute-value">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" /> expires" content="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>" /> robots" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp,index,follow</a>" /> Language" content="<a class="attribute-value">English</a>" /> Cache-Control" content="<a class="attribute-value">Public</a>" /> verify-v1" content="<a class="attribute-value">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" /> viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" /> This is too messy but before I do something drastic that I'll possibly regret please can you confirm that, in your opinion, I am best to remove everything with the exception of this: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" /> Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" /> I realise there is a verify-v1 tag in there but this can be done through a file on our server so while cleaning up that might as well go. Would there be an argument for keeping any of the other tags or are they all pretty much redundant now? Many thanks! Chris0 -
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 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
SEO Landing Page Fail
We have a PPC landing page template that I've used to aggregate blog post collections thematically. http://www.ietravel.com/machu-picchu-travel http://www.ietravel.com/kenya-and-tanzania-safari The hope was that they would start ranking. After 5 months, it has yet to happen.Thought it was a good idea at the time because these pages have a nice prominent call-to-action area. It now occurs to me that the pages are probably under-performing because they are not incorporated into the main site navigation. Do you think that if I move these under their appropriate categories in the main site I'll see some lift? (Of course, I will add 301 redirects as well.) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csmithal0