Meta refresh = 0 seconds

[dvansant]

For a number of reasons I'm confined to having to do a client side redirect for html pages. Am I right in thinking that Google treats zero seconds roughly the same as proper 301 redirects? Anyone have experience with zero second meta refresh redirects, good or bad?

[goodnewscowboy]

Hi Derek:From the Moz manual,  "Meta refreshes do pass some link juice but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to usability and the loss of link juice passed"

Also, some SEO's feel that Google looks askance at their use.

There's no way to talk them into a 301 redirect, huh?

[dvansant]

Thanks for the reply Cowboy.

301 is the ultimate destination but could be months or year away for reasons beyond my control and there is enough juice being lost to warrant a temporary solution. I've seen the references to Google and meta refreshses, which is why I posed the question, but I've also seen people say 0 second refreshes have worked.

I just want to make sure nobody had a story like: "we did that once and dropped off the index", etc. I'm thinking that the temporary gain is worth the risk if any, unless I hear differently from somebody.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, I've seen mixed reviews on this one, test-wise. The inconsistency is why we don't recommend it (as GNC said). Generally, though, I'd say it's better than nothing.

[dvansant]

Thanks.

[Pavlicko]

We just went through a situation like this with a pretty decent size client - 400+ ,htm pages that couldn't be redirected to .aspx due to us not being able to modify IIS settings on the server; and the url directory paths were all different too - basically a nightmare.

Like you probably already know, it could go either way with a meta refresh. You'd probably be ok, but I'd avoid if possible. Our solution worked really well, but it's specific to windows servers.

Our solution was to create a spreadsheet with 2 columns - left was all the .htm pages to be redirected - the right- the new .aspx page that it should 301 redirect to. We then wrote a script to dynamically create new copies of the .htm pages and insert a runatserver redirection code snippet at the top of each that pointed to the proper redirect page.

1 month out, everything looks good. No issues and the site is kickin.

[dvansant]

Interesting approach, thank you.