meta refresh for page reload (not redirect) affecting ranking

[johoney]

Our site has <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300"> so refreshes every 5 minutes. Apart from being ugly and contrary to good usability could it also be the cause of depressed ranking/traffic/PR?

Cheers - JoC

[tedster]

Hard to say on that one, but I've never run into it. If meta refresh a useful feature for the page, you might consider letting your users opt-in the way we do here for meta-refresh on the Active Posts list. Have it off by default, but you can set it on if you want.

by the way, you said "our site". Do you mean that the refresh is on every page?

[edited by: tedster at 12:06 am (utc) on June 12, 2008]

[johoney]

Thank you Tedster. The opt-in sounds sensible.

The refresh only applies to the index page.

Cheers - JoC