What is the Meta Refresh tag?

Everything You Need to Know About Meta Refresh

The meta refresh tag is used to reload a web page at specific intervals so that you can see instantly if any changes have been made to the page.

This meta tag is used when you need the information on a page of the site to be refreshed every so often.

Meta Refresh is typically used for news sites, and in this article, we will tell you how to use it and its advantages and disadvantages.

There are many things to do to improve SEO, such as buy SEO traffic, which can have a direct impact on increasing website visits. But is the refresh tag useful for SEO?

You should be careful that using this meta is generally not recommended and if used incorrectly, it can harm the website's SEO.

Meta Refresh Tag

Sometimes you need to reload the information on a web page. The best example for these pages is highly visited news websites that need to provide new news to users on average every few minutes.

Now the question is how can this be done?

Well, this is very easy to do and is possible by inserting a line of code in the Head section of the page. This method is called Meta Refresh and is placed in the redirection or redirection category.

In this article from the KeyUpSeo blog, we want to examine this meta tag in detail.

How to use Meta Refresh

To reload pages, you can place the following code in the Head section of the page. As a result, the desired page will be automatically refreshed after the time you have specified (in seconds).

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30; URL=https://www.example.com" />

Some important things to know about Meta Refresh are:

• The numbers placed in the Content section of the Meta Refresh tag are the amount of time (in seconds) that the user will be redirected to the next page.
• Also, in the URL section of the Meta Refresh tag, the full address of the destination page must be entered.

Finally, just place the Meta Refresh tag in the Head section of the page (preferably at the beginning). The significant thing about the Meta Refresh tag is that you can use it to reload the same page, and you don't necessarily need to redirect the user to a new page.

To do this, you can enter your Meta Refresh as follows:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300" />

Disadvantages of Reloading Pages via Meta Refresh Tag

Using the Meta Refresh tag is not generally used and is usually not used for important pages that have high traffic.

Reloading pages without the users' consent will be annoying; especially if they are reading a long article and cannot find the rest of the article quickly after loading.

Also, on graphics-heavy pages that have a high volume, reloading means the user has to wait to see the previous images again and wastes some of their internet bandwidth.

In addition to the above, it is good to know that automatic and unauthorized page reloading, if used excessively, will be considered a security flaw by some users and will cause them to leave the website.

As a result, unnecessary use of Meta Refresh will cause you to lose some of your impatient users. This will also reduce Time on Site and Page Views Per Visit and increase the bounce rate, which will affect the ranking and traffic of your site pages.

Typically, the refresh meta tag is used on pages such as the home page of news sites. On such pages, the user is only reading the news headlines, and due to the small size of these pages, they do not take long to load.

Redirecting Website Pages Using Meta Refresh

As we said, the refresh meta tag can be used to redirect pages and redirect visitors to new pages. Take a look at the following tag example:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=https://www.example.com" />

By executing this code, due to the zero time duration, the user will be redirected to the new address you specified as soon as the page loads. Also, this meta tag can be used to redirect the address of so-called 404 pages to the home page.

Disadvantages of page redirects with the Meta Refresh tag

According to some experts, this type of redirect may be considered spam by search engines and if used in large numbers on a website, it may lead to removal from search engine results.

Also, some old browsers are not compatible with the meta refresh tag and if the user is redirected to the new address in less than 2 to 3 seconds, he will lose the ability to return to the previous page. As a result, it is recommended to use a 301 redirect if you need to transfer page addresses.

Given the changes in the 3xx redirect rules, using a 301 redirect is less risky and, unlike in the past, will no longer reduce website rankings and traffic. Also, studies conducted by MOZ website experts have shown that the Meta Refresh tag transfers almost no Link Juice.

Meta Refresh is obsolete!

In this article, we tried to introduce you to the concept of the refresh meta tag.

This meta tag has no specific use on sites, and news websites may only use it for the home page and updating news headlines.

Also, as we have seen, this method of redirecting pages does not have much of a positive effect on your site's SEO and has been almost obsolete for some time.

On the other hand, it may have a negative effect on user experience. It is better to read the Impact of user experience and content on ranking article.

Our suggestion to you is to use 3xx redirects to change the address of your site pages as much as possible.