meta http-equiv="refresh"

What time do you think is acceptable

[Visit Thailand]

I have a page that changes every so often set at 200 do you think this is ok (re the users and the se's) or would 400 or so be better - How do search engines react to such refresh rates, I do not want them to think I am doing anything I shouldn't be.

[chameleon]

Do any of the search engines acually use that META tag?

[tedster]

A year or two ago meta refresh tags were search engine death. But today, it's not so bad from what I can see. Still, I'd up that rate just a bit. Meta refreshing to another page does have a spammer aura about it

[bobriggs]

Haven't used it in a while, but I did have one page that was indexed in inktomi, and ink followed it. It still listed the old url for a long time. I finally put a server side 301 redirect on it, it still listed the old page for a while, then after a few months, it started listing the new page. It still requests the old page, however.

I'm not for sure, but my thinking is that google will not obey that tag, I do see it checking the 301 redirects from the server, however.

Having said that, I realize that's not your question anyway. When you mentioned 'refresh rates', that's what everyone responded to. Did you mean (meta) refresh tag, or do you want to respond with 400? Or did the page get deleted, in which case you want a 404 error?

* 400 Bad Request: Impossible request or syntax error.

Probably, you want a 304 response:
* 304 Not modified: Use the local copy if you cached it. Often seen when using the HEAD method, rather than the GET method.

Unless you did change the page, then 200 OK is what you want to serve.

When you say that it's 'Set at 200', do you mean that you send non-parsed-headers? Normally, the server will deliver a 304 or a 200 response, and both are perfectly acceptable.

//Hope I understood the question correctly ;)

[Visit Thailand]

As Tedster mentioned in the past meta refresh tags were very much a no no if you were not doing something extremely fishy.

I am using the meta refresh on the same page it is really so that if people sit on that page it will auto refresh every so often.

The 200 I was referring to was the seconds after which the page refreshes.

I am more concerned about the SE's thinking I am trying to spam in some way.

Thanks all.

[bobriggs]

My bad, I forgot to remember the title of the post and looked back just at your original text.

If it's refreshing the same page, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. If it's refreshing and redirecting, that's another matter. (Especially redirecting to another domain) I wouldn't take a chance on the latter.

[tedster]

Same here -- I've been off topic.

Time for bed.

[tedster]

OK, so I am off topic. But maybe this will be of interest in a slightly off topic kind of way.

A hearty collection of instant refreshes to a different domain worked out well for me recently. I was replacing an old site with a total redesign at a new domain.

On the old site I put links with good link text into the body of the HTML and an instant meta refresh in the head. I did this for all the former site entry pages - so that their reincarnation on the new domain was immediately available to people who had bookmarked the old URL.

I wasn't really thinking a lot about the SEs when I did it, but the new domain woke up immediately on many of the important SERPs -- like it had a transfusion of joy juice.

I'm not recommending this method, just reporting the data. The new site had only 1 inbound link in its first month, except for these refresh pages on the old domain. Also did Inktomi PFI for the entry pages.

But the new domain began life with a PR5 on Google (the old domain only had a PR4!) and it dominated most of the target keywords on several search engines.

So the meta refresh didn't seem to hurt the value of the link at all. But since I was killing the old domain anyway, I really didn't watch to see the effect on the old pages.