Meta Tag "Refresh"

does this effect SERP?

[newwebster]

I have a page that ranks #1 for a keyword phrase and has a single key word phrase link pointing to another web site where these items can be found. Instead of the customers having to click on the link, I was wanting to use a meta refresh and have the other web page load automatically. Is this safe to do without losing SERP positioning? Does Anybody that has any experience with this?

Thanks

[Spannerworks]

If you use a meta refresh with a very short interval say 1 second. Then Google would index the destination page. So the page that's ranking at the moment would be completely ignored. A longer meta refresh (say 10 seconds) would work.

[danny]

If you use a meta refresh with a very short interval say 1 second. Then Google would index the destination page. So the page that's ranking at the moment would be completely ignored.

I don't believe this is true. If you do want the destination page to rank instead of the current page, you want to do a 301 redirect.

And if you use a one second META REFRESH, Google may or may not consider that objectionable cloaking...

[newwebster]

"I don't believe this is true. If you do want the destination page to rank instead of the current page, you want to do a 301 redirect."

I do not want the destination page to rank since the current page is ranked #1 for the keyword phrase.

"If you use a meta refresh with a very short interval say 1 second. Then Google would index the destination page. So the page that's ranking at the moment would be completely ignored. A longer meta refresh (say 10 seconds) would work."

If I need to refresh with this length of time, the customers will be able to click on the link before the page refreshes. There only one sentence with one key word phrase on the page. Has anyone experimented with the time thing?

Thanks

[Nicke]

I had during a long time a meta refresh on my main page directed to a main.php page, since this was 4 years ago I was not aware of that index.php was possible.

That page was stuffed with some keywords/section of the website and links.

I had a 0 second refresh, it was removed only 6 monhs ago. Now I use a htaccess file to tell apache main.php is the index file.

The front page were PR5 and indexed by Google and not penalised in anyway.

[Spannerworks]

>If I need to refresh with this length of time, the customers will be able to click on the link before the page refreshes. There only one sentence with one key word phrase on the page. Has anyone experimented with the time thing?

I guessed the 10 second interval would be too much for you. Unfortunately I have only tested for the 1 second and 10 second intervals. There may be a shorter than 10 sec interval which will work, but can't comment.

What you're really trying to do is a form of cloaking. Get the search engines to index one page and redirect the user to another. And there lies your problem. There isn't an acceptable way to do this. Though there're plenty of ways to do it including JavaScript redirects.

[newwebster]

Would JavaScript be safe?

Thanks

[Spannerworks]

No, there is no safe option in the eyes of the Search Engines. Serving one page to the spider and redirecting the same page so a user can't see it, is good old fashioned spamming. Doesn't matter what method you use.

[onedumbear]

I placed a refresh tag on one of my sites pages just to send googlebot to a new site for spidering.

I used a 0 sec. refresh. This was done a few months ago.
It worked great and the new page was indexed quickly.
If i remember correctly, the page with the refresh tag continued to show up in the results with no damage to rank. I eventually had to put a "none" in my index tag to remove it from google so I would'nt be a spammer.