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Do Meta Redirects Work?
By Gary Thomas | September 4, 2007
I’ve been asked the question time and time again! “Do I have to do a 301 redirect or can I do a Meta redirect? My IT guy says we can’t do a 301 redirect.” I recently came across this article from Sebastian’s Pamphlets; “Google and Yahoo accept undelayed meta refreshs as 301 redirects.”
Yahoo clearly states how they treat a zero meta refresh, that is a redirect with a delay of zero seconds:
- META Refresh: <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=…> is recognized as a 301 if it specifies little or no delay or as a 302 if it specifies noticeable delay.
Google is in the process of rewriting their documentation, in the current version of their help documents the meta refresh is not (yet!) mentioned. The Google Mini treats all meta refreshs as 302:
- A META tag that specifies http-equiv=”refresh” is handled as a 302 redirect.
but that’s handled differently on the Web. I’ve asked Google’s search evangelist Adam Lasnik and he said:
- [The] best idea is to use 301/302s directly whenever possible; otherwise, next best is to do a metarefresh with 0 for a 301. I don’t believe we recommend or support any 302-alternative.
Although the two engines state that they accept the zero second refresh, I highly recommend making your IT find a way to do a server side redirect. As mentioned in the article this great for you so called hobby sites or if you are using a free hosting service. My only fear in the Meta refresh is it can come across as being spammy. The Meta Refresh is has been widely used by spammers.
I would only use this technique if you hosting provider doesn’t allow the proper server side redirects.
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September 5th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Gary,
I agree that the server side redirects are the “sure fire” way. However, if you REALLY can’t do a proper server side 301, there are also coldfusion, asp, php (and other methods) redirects that do not rely on the meta refresh.
Matt