Google’s John Mueller cautions site owners about the use of meta refresh, highlighting that it may lead to incorrect content being indexed. This issue arises because Google considers meta refresh as a redirect, resulting in the page where the user ends up being indexed.
Site owners might experience challenges with meta refresh in some situations. For instance, if an online store uses meta refresh to transition a customer from a product listing page to a payment page, it becomes problematic. In such a scenario, the payment page could be indexed instead of the actual product page.
Mueller discussed this issue during a recent Webmaster Central hangout when a question was raised:
“Some sites are using meta refresh after 5 seconds and redirecting the user to a payment page from the content. In this case, does it impact their ranking? I still see their pages indexed with content behind payment, and Google User can’t see the content. What is Google’s recommendation here?”
According to Mueller, this practice is not only poor from a user experience standpoint, but Google will also assume that the page being redirected to is the one meant for indexing.
Therefore, when using meta refresh, keep this in mind.
Mueller also mentions that this approach might frustrate users, and it’s preferable to allow users to navigate a site independently rather than employing a delayed redirect.
For more insights, you can watch Mueller’s full response in the video starting at the 42:02 mark.
“That sounds like a really bad practice, and I assume most people who visit your website once, when you do this, they won’t come back. So that’s at least one group of people who are going to be upset. With regards to the meta refresh, we do see this as a redirect as well. So if you do this across your pages, there’s a big chance we’ll follow this redirect and think ‘Oh, this payment page is actually what you want to have indexed and not the actual content,’ and in that case, we won’t have the content indexed. So that’s generally a bad thing too.”
