Meta refresh for URL forwarding without Google penalty

[potentialgeek]

I'd like to move content from one site to another site. The "donor" site has decent ranking but not as good as the "recipient" site. I may want to develop the donor site later so I don't want to shut it down yet.

I don't want to put links on the donor site to the recipient site, because it could look unnatural and spammy--too many links from one site--and then cause problems for both sites (looks like a bogus network). I also don't want to use 301 Permanent Redirects (because the changes may not be permanent, and it could establish too close ties between the two). I'm used to using 301s for intra-site changes not redirecting to different sites.

Is it possible to use a Meta-refresh tag on each page on the donor site to the recipient site without getting into Google Trouble? This would effectively help the visitors find what they want.

I read in one Google forum that Google treats a Meta-refresh of 0 as a 301 Permanent Redirect. Is that true? Did Google ever confirm that or did you find it out by your own experience? If so, what about one second?

e.g:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/">

The idea is to put that type of code on each page and each target URL will either be to a single directory or different pages within the directory.

e.g:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/widgets/">

or:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/widgets/red.html">

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/widgets/white.html">

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/widgets/blue.html">

p/g

[rainborick]

Yes, its true that Google and Yahoo! will treat a <meta> refresh as a 301 redirect. Although Google officially discourages it, it is very useful when moving a site from a host where you don't have adequate controls to set up a proper server-level response. I doubt that the delay setting will affect the way Google treats these. Adding a link to the same target page not only helps your efforts pass a manual inspection, but also insures that users who have disabled JavaScript will be able to navigate to the page's new location. So I would encourage you to reconsider the decision to omit the link.