301 Meta Refresh Redirects: How Google and Yahoo Sees It

Normally the best practice for 301/302 (permanent/temporary) redirects are through your web server. However, you can only do this if you own your own domain. So what happens when you’re using a free webpage service such as Blogger, WordPress and Typepad, and you want to do 301 redirects to your new website?

If you’re thinking of doing Javascript redirects, this isn’t highly recommended as Google and Yahoo web crawlers won’t be able to follow the redirects, which will affect the destination’s ranking and indexing.

Although not the best, your next best bet is using the meta refresh tag to do your redirections. It seems that Google recognises meta redirects and Googlebot should be able to crawl to the new page, according to Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Yahoo’s Search Help also seems to recognise meta redirects and the crawler will be able to follow the redirects.

It appears that a meta refresh delay of 0 or 1 second will be considered as a 301 redirect and anything longer is considered a 302.

I will try to post a javascript solution that will be able to handle redirects from your old website to appropriate pages of your new website this weekend.

6 Comments on "301 Meta Refresh Redirects: How Google and Yahoo Sees It"


  1. Hi i recently changed my blogspot address to another blogspt adress..is it against google tos to use the following code

    to redirect the person visiting my old address to the new one?

    Reply

    1. I haven’t read through Google’s TOS for Blogger but I would imagine that if you’re doing it for a genuine site migration and not for malicious reasons, then it would be deemed ok. Site migrations are pretty normal on the Internet.

      Reply

  2. Thanks I was worried about use of meta 301, i’ve read your javascript code to redirect it’s fine. my problem is that i want to redirect a full blogger blog to another blogger blog, do think this is posible? do know how to do it?

    PD:excuseme I can read but i can’t write in english good(I’m from Spain)

    Reply

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