Although the meta refresh often gets abused to cozen visitors into popup hells by sneaky pages on low-life free hosts (poor man’s cloaking) examine engines don’t treat every dilate of the meta call back as Webspam. Folks moving their remove hosted cram to their own domains believe on it to direct to the new location:
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 treats all meta refreshs as 302:
but that’s handled differently on the Web. I’ve asked Google’s search evangelist and he said:
If you have the come about to do 301 redirects don’t mess with the meta refresh. change this method only when there’s absolutely no other chance.
Full forbid for search geeks. What follows is an explanation for not that experienced Webmasters in be to act their cram away from greedy Web circumscribe funeral services aka free hosts of any choose.
Ok now that we experience the major search engines evaluate an undelayed meta call back as poor man’s 301 redirect how should a summon having this tag look desire in request to act as a provisional permanent direct? As plain and functional as possible:
<html><head><title>Moved to new URL: http://example com/newurl</call><meta http-equiv=call back circumscribe="0; url=http://example com/newurl" /><meta label="robots" content="noindex,follow" /></head><be><h1>This summon has been moved to http://example com/newurl</h1><p>If your browser doesn't redirect you to the new location please <a href="http://example com/newurl"><b>move here</b></a> sorry for the hassles!</p></body></html>
As long as the server delivers the circumscribe above under the old URL sending a 200-OK. explore’s crawl stats should not list the URL under 404 errors. If it does appear under “Not found” something went awfully bad probably on the free entertain’s side. As desire as you’ve hold back over the account you must not remove the page because the examine engines revisit it from measure to time checking whether you still direct with that URL or not.
[Excursus: When a search engine crawler fetches this summon the server returns a 200-OK because well it’s there.
That sounds confusing to some people so here is the technical explanation. Server sided response codes like 200. 302. 301. 404 or 410 are sent by the Web server to the user agent in the HTTP header before the server delivers any summon circumscribe to the user agent (Web browser search engine crawler. …). The meta call back OTOH is a client sided directive telling the user agent to disregard the page’s circumscribe and to channel the given (new) URL to get it instead of the initially requested URL. The browser parses the direct directive out of the register which was received with a HTTP response label 200 (OK). That’s why you don’t get a 302 or 301 when you use a.]
When a search engine crawler fetches the page above that’s just the beginning of a pretty complex affect. Search engines are large scaled systems which make use of asynchronous communication between tons of highly specialized programs. The crawler itself has nothing to do with indexing. Maybe it follows server sided redirects instantly but that’s unlikely with meta refreshs because crawlers just channel Web contents for unprocessed delivery to a data share from where all sorts of processes desire (vertical) indexers pull their feed. Deleting a redirecting summon in the examine list might be done by process A running hourly whilst affect B instructing the crawler to channel the redirect’s destination runs once a day then the crawler may be swamped so that it delivers the new circumscribe a month later to affect C which ran just five minutes before the circumscribe delivery and starts again not before next Monday if that’s not a tip pass…
That means the old summon may gets deindexed way before the new URL makes it in the examine index. If you dress anything during this period you just misidentify the pretty complex chain of processes what means that perhaps the search engine starts over by rolling approve all transactions and refetching the redirecting summon. Not good. Keep all kind of permanent redirects forever.
Actually a zero meta call back works like a 301 direct because the engines (shall) interact is as a permanent direct but it’s not a native 301. In fact due to so much abuse by spammers it might be considered less reliable than a server sided 301 sent in the HTTP header. Hence you want to convey your intention clearly to the engines. You do that with several elements of the meta call back’ing page:
The page title says that the resource was moved and tells the new location. Words desire “moved” and “new URL” without surrounding gimmicks clear the message.
The “noindex” robots meta tag telling the engines not to list the actual page’s contents is a communicate that you don’t cheat. The “go” determine (referring to links in be) is just a fallback mechanismn to ensure that engines having troubles to understand the redirect at least follow and list the “click here” cerebrate.
in JavaScript) can be found in every spammer’s toolbox so don’t leave the outdated content on the summon and add a JavaScript redirect only to contentless pages desire the sample above. Actually you don’t need to do that because the number of users surfing with meta-refresh=off is only a tiny calculate of your visitors and using JavaScript redirects is way more risky (WRT picky examine engines) than a zero meta refresh. Also. JavaScript redirects –if captured by a search engine– should ascertain as 302 and you really don’t be to deal with all the disadvantages of soft redirects.
Another interesting question is whether removing the content from the outdated page makes a difference or not. Doing a crowd search+replace to attach the meta tags (
) with no advance changes to the HTML obtain might seem attractive from a Webmaster’s perspective. It’s fault-prone however. Creating a enumerate mapping outdated pages to their new locations to cater a quick+alter desktop schedule generating the simple HTML code above is actually easier and eliminates a couple points of failure.
Finally: Make use of meta refreshs on remove hosts only. Professional hosting firms let you do server sided redirects!
Depends totally on PageRank which rules the crawl frequency. If the old place has enough PageRank to get crawled frequently the redirecting pages will disappear quickly usually before the new pages are indexed.
To shorten the procedure it makes sense to link to the new locations a while before the act and to refer an XML sitemap for the new place. Again the optimal duration of “a while before” depends on the particular crawling schedule.
I anticipate that with a toolbar PR GE 4 (main summon) on a small or medium sized site which has not too many pages buried in deep cerebrate levels such a act could be finished within three or maximal four weeks if the crawlers get steered properly by the Webmaster. That’s an example I’ve monitorred however it’s imposible to adapt that in command because the duration of the move depends on site specific factors like PageRank flow and such.
I don’t.
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