Meta Refresh - explanation please

I'm using a meta refresh to send users and Search Engines from a dynamic page (up to 500 pages cached) I don't want anyone to visit now as it's redundant now, to my home page

It does this after 10 seconds.

Does this have any pro's & con's with search engines?

I can't use htaccess for this redirect as I do with others as it doesn't work - DON'T ASK, please just explain about meta refresh for me.

ALSO - would it be good after a week or so to exclude ROBOTS from this file with the robosts.txt, so pages drop out sooner?

Thanks Ian

 

They say that it is not good for search engines, however I have one site where the redirect itself has a PR of 5 and is indexed on search engines, so go figure

 

Well, I won't recommend to use meta refresh, but if you'll do, keep it as you have it know. Small times like 1 second could be seen as a way of cloaking (which in fact, is a bit what you are doing).

Blocking robots? SE's won't see the meta refresh redirect, so your home page won't get any of the benefits.

On the other, I know there you can't use htaccess, but are you also limited to do that in PHP/ASP?

 

Personally I like the meta refresh (5 secs or more) with a small amount of text that links to the page you are redirecting to for the user to click, in case they don't (want to wait) get redirected. You shouldn't piss off any bot that way .

 

If your site is written in PHP you could use the following code:

header("Location: http://www.google.com");

PHP:

where instead of google's site you use your address plus page.

The trick is that this works only if absolutely NO text has been sent to the user.

 

The problem with meta refresh is that search engines will index the page with the meta refresh on and also the new page and you will end up with both pages listed.

I know of sites that have moved urls months ago which used this method and the old site is still indexed with its meta refresh tag pointing at the new page. This will not pass any PR and will never get de-indexed.

 

Indeed. Mariush was partly right. You could use a PHP redirect code. But use it like this :

header (’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header (’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com’);

PHP:

This is a permanent 301 redirect (which is what you are after), without using .htaccess.

Cheers

 

Thanks for the explanations. I've now managed to use the Moved Permanently command which I couldn't get to work yesterday!