What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?

[pkontopoulos]

Hello all,

we have a client which is a sports website. In fact it is a veyr big website and has a huge number of news per day.

This is mostly the reason why it refreshes some of its pages with news list every 420 seconds.

We currently use meta refresh. I have read here and elsewhere that meta refreshes should be avoided. But we don't do it to send to another page and pass any kind of page authority / juice.

Is in this case javascript refresh better? Is there any other better way.

What do you think & suggest?

Thank you!

[GlobeRunner]

I don't understand why you believe you need to add a refresh on the page. Even though you are posting new content on the page, there is no need to refresh the page. Users will refresh the page themselves, or they will just come to the page and see the updated content. The search engines will naturally know that the site contains new content: they will see that you have added fresh content on the site (new news items) and will come back.

I would not include any sort of refresh on the page. You might include a message on the page to tell users to refresh the page for the latest content, but that's all I would do. I do not recommend any auto-refresh.

[Tom-Anthony]

Hi Panos,

I don't necessarily disagree with Eric's answer, but I wanted to answer from a different point of view. I'm going to assume you really want or need some refresh mechanism built into the page.

In which case I'd agree that a Javascript approach using AJAX is probably a better solution. It will mean that users only need to load the new article headlines, and not the whole page, so the strain on your servers should be reduced. Furthermore, I find it a neater solution all around anyway - you could provide a notice 'new headlines available' that people click to refresh the articles list. This might be the best of both worlds?

Either way, meta refresh isn't as flexible, isn't as clean, and will put more strain on your servers.

Good luck!

-Tom