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Went Hot: September 4, 2007 - 9:15 am
Posted By: Sebastian 405 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://sebastians-pamphlets.com)
Category: SEO
The post discusses the meta refresh addressing technically unexperienced publishers trying to rescue their stuff from free hosts.
4 Comments
Comments
Matt Cutts hinted a very long time ago that this was maybe coming one day.
In any case, you have to set this refresh up on a file-by-file basis, and it cannot be used to fix many of the canonicalisation issues that affect sites.
If you can use .htaccess to make the changes, then always use that instead.
It's not meant for those purposes. A meta refresh is just a "kiss my ass free host" farewell statement and shouldn't be used for anything else.
nice catch - thanks for posting this.
And I think this is an important move on the part of the engines. It puts the power back in the hands of literally anyone who has access to the HTML files, not just those who understand or have access to IIS or .htaccess.
I know that even I don't have the type of easy access I'd like in order to be able to set 301s properly - that after I ran a web (and hosting) shop for a long time. I assume many regular (non-SEM) folks have less access than I do, less under-standing, etc. This at least allows the the ability to pretty easily do a 301 without too much hassling with a host, server admin, or even having t teach themselves about such.
Perhaps another example of how blogging has changed Google's perspective... a meta refresh was sketchy on web sites, but since so many people were on blogging services sans any server side controls, how else could they redirect?
Google has to consider the audience, and bloggers on Moveable Type, Typepad etc. with meta refreshes are not spammers.