 Meta Refreshments in Dallas |
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 Mar 6 2008, 03:49 PM
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I was in Dallas on Tuesday delivering a workshop on search marketing (again, what else?). Though there was some bad weather in some suburbs, we still had a nice turnout. Of course, the Network Solutions® team was on hand to answer questions and help out attendees. There are always good questions that come up in our SEM seminars and the Dallas show was no exception. One gentleman presented his situation to me and asked if it hurt his rankings. He had moved his Web site with a new domain name and host and didn’t quite know what to do with the old one. Logically, he knew that he needed to direct old site visitors to the new site. So he set up a meta refresh – the code is a simple line that appears in the
Here, we see that the ”content=”6;” means that the browser will wait six seconds before the redirect takes place, and then will open the Web site at www.examplenewsite.com (changed for this example). This presents some fairly complex issues that are easily avoided… First, the only redirect that is recommended is a 301 redirect. This is defined by Google® as “The requested page has been permanently moved to a new location. When the server returns this response (as a response to a GET or HEAD request), it automatically forwards the requestor to the new location. You should use this code to let Googlebot know that a page or site has permanently moved to a new location.” Second, if you use a meta refresh, this could present a bad user experience…the user thinks they are going to one site, but is sent to another. Another problem is with the very long time the redirect is set for. There is evidence that Yahoo!® Slurp (Yahoo’s bot) will treat a meta refresh with time set to “0” as a 301, but I wouldn’t count on it. In this case, a six second delay is definitely a bad user experience, which is what the bots do not want. Google® doesn’t seem to want a meta refresh even with a 0 time frame. In fact, the Google® Webmaster Tools state, “Avoid using meta refreshes in the statement of your pages.”Furthermore, I found this from a Googler who said in a Google® Groups forum: “In general we would like to recommend not using meta refreshes in lieu of a server side 301 redirect. Not only are they generally seen as a bad experience by users, they are also treated differently by the various search engines. If you cannot do a server side redirect, I would recommend grabbing a list of your links from your webmaster tools account and contacting the site owners to change them appropriately. Yes, it is a bit of work, but webmasters are generally happy to comply. You should generally not rely on meta refreshes (or javascript redirects) to be treated the same as server side redirects.” With a properly set up 301, sites can comfortably change domains and maintain the best user experience. As always, satisfy the humans and the spiders and you’ll be good to go. Won’t that be refreshing? (Sorry, couldn’t resist…) View the full article |
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