Before starting a discussion about refreshing meta tags, it’s better to start with an example. Imagine one of the pages of your website for any reason needs to be refreshed or reloaded within certain time periods. The best examples for these pages are also high-quality news websites that, on average, should provide new users with news every few minutes.
The question now is how can this be done?
Well, it’s not actually that hard to do it! This can simply be done by entering a few lines of code in the header. This is called the Meta Refresh tag!
Reload pages by refreshing meta tag and its disadvantages
In order to reload the pages, you can place the following code in the head section of the page. By doing so, the page will automatically be refreshed after the specified time period (in seconds).
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300; URL=http://www.example.com" />The important points you should know about meta-refresh tag are:
- The number in the Content section in the meta tag is actually the amount of time (in seconds) that the user is transmitted to the next page.
- Also, in the URL Refresh section of the tag, you must enter the URL of the destination page in full.
Just place the Meta Refresh tag in the page header (preferably at the beginning of the page). The remarkable thing about refreshing meta tags is that you can use it to reload that page and you do not need to move the user to a new page.
To do this, you can enter your Meta Refresh as follows:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300" />However, it’s not bad to know a little about the disadvantages of refreshing the page this way. In fact, the use of reflexive meta tags is not universally applicable and is not usually used for important pages that have a high visit.
Reloading pages without the consent of users will certainly be annoying for them, especially if they are studying a long story and cannot read fast. Also, on high volume pages, reloading means waiting for the user to view the previous images and wasting part of his Internet volume.
In addition to the above, it’s not a bad thing to know that automatic loading and unpacking pages, if used extensively, are considered by some users as a form of security and will leave them out of the website. The result is that the use of Meta Refresh will cause some users to lose their interest. This will also reduce user-time on your website, and page views per visit, which will affect the ranking and traffic of your website’s pages.
Typically, refresh meta tags are used on pages like the home page of news databases. On such pages, the user is only studying news titles, and due to the low volume of these pages, loading them will not take much time.
Retrieve pages using Meta Refresh
As we said, refreshing meta tags can be used to retrieve pages and transfer viewers to new pages. Look at the sample tag below:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.example.com" />By executing this code, the user will be redirected to the new address you specified, due to zero time, at the time of loading the page. Also, this meta tag can also be used to move the address of pages such as the 404 page to the home page. However, according to some experts, this kind of redirects may be considered bad, and if they are used on a large number of websites, they may be removed from search engine results.
Additionally, some older browsers are not compatible with refresh meta tags, and if the user moves to a new address in less than 2 or 3 seconds, it will lose the ability to return to the previous page. As a result, it is recommended that you use redirects 301 if you need to transfer the addresses of the pages.
Regarding the changes to the 3XX redirect rules, the use of Redirects 301 is less risky and, unlike in the past, it will not reduce the rank and traffic of the websites. Also, in a study by experts from the Moz website, it is noted that the Meta Refresh tag does not transmit almost any Link Juice.
Conclusion
The last part of the article was related to redirection and address change. In this article, we tried to familiarize you only with the concept of refresh meta tags, because as we have seen, this method of redirecting pages does not have a good effect on your website’s SEO, and it’s almost outdated for some time.
Our offer is exactly the same to you. Use the 3XX redirects to change the addresses of your website pages as much as possible. We hope that the study of this article has been helpful to you.
We are looking forward to hear from you in the comment section.
