What is a meta refresh?
A meta refresh is the tag itself: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30"> reloads the page every thirty seconds; add a URL and it sends the browser elsewhere after the delay. It dates from the earliest browsers, when there was no JavaScript and no other way to make a page update on its own. News tickers, auction pages and "please wait" screens used it. Today its two uses are auto-refreshing a page and acting as a poor cousin of a server redirect, and both have better alternatives.
Search engines understand the tag, in that they follow it. What they think of it depends on how it is used.
Why it matters
Why a meta refresh matters
It matters because it is one of the oldest ways to confuse both users and crawlers. A page that reloads itself resets scroll position, interrupts form entry and skews analytics by counting one visit as many. A page that redirects after a delay looks, to a crawler, like a page whose content is not its real content, which is the shape of a cloaking attempt. Google's spam policies list sneaky redirects, and while a plain meta refresh is not itself a violation, a pattern of delayed redirects is the kind of thing that gets a site looked at.
Accessibility guidelines also warn against it, because users who read slowly or rely on assistive technology lose control of the page.
In practice
How a meta refresh works in practice
- 01
For auto-updating content, do not use it. Modern pages update sections in place with JavaScript, fetching new data without reloading, which is faster, keeps the user's place and is invisible to analytics. If you must reload a whole page (a kiosk display, a status board), set a long interval and keep the page out of search with a noindex tag, since it is not a page anyone should land on from results.
- 02
For redirects, use a server-side 301 or 302 wherever you have access, and keep the meta refresh for the few cases where you do not. If you use it to redirect, set the delay to zero so Google treats it as permanent, point it at the final URL and remove the page from sitemaps. Audit your site occasionally for refresh tags left behind by old campaigns, plugins or templates; they tend to outlive the reasons they were added.
Watch out
What people get wrong about meta refreshes
Assuming it is harmless because it is old. The refresh tag behaves differently across engines, interferes with the back button and can double or triple pageview counts. The other mistake is using a delayed refresh to show a message before a redirect, which engines may read as a temporary move and users read as a broken page.
The last is forgetting it exists. A refresh tag in a shared template applies to every page that uses it, and the person who added it for one campaign has usually left.
