Meta refresh - will it harm rankings?

Any help welcome..!

[Sweeets]

A meta refresh has been placed on a site which represents the old company branding, but which ranks highly for lots of great keywords. We want to harness this traffic and take them to the new site with new branding.

We are working on SEO of new company site with new branding, but we still need to take the traffic from the 'old' site... will the meta refresh of 1 second on the 'old' site affect it's rankings - what's your experience?

We didn't want to do a redirect for obvious reasons...

[SEOMike]

Try implementing a 301 redirect. This tells the robots that the pages have moved permanently. We have had success with maintaining "old" listings by rolling them over to the new page. As long as the new page is on target, it seems that the SEs just update the link / description to match the new page's content. You can implement this redirect using IIS, Apache, JavaScript, or a script in .net.

Oh, and a meta refresh of 1 second will destroy any ranking you hold for the pages. I'd quit using this ASAP and replace it with a 301.

[Voyteck]

How about if the content on the page is different then the content on the page that you redirect to. Is still on topic but different information.

Why do you think meta refresh will kill the rankings that quickly?

[SEOMike]

How about if the content on the page is different then the content on the page that you redirect to. Is still on topic but different information.

It seems that in my use of this that as long as the new page has all factors equal (PR and all of that) and the content is on the same subject with the same percentages of keyphrases, the listing will be maintained either at the same spot or very close.

Why do you think meta refresh will kill the rankings that quickly?

As soon as a SE sees that it's being sent somewhere else through a meta refresh with no explaination (a 301) it drops the listing. This is because the redirect using a refresh is a old SPAM tactic and Google frowns upon it.

As quoted from Google's site under "Change the URL of your website": [google.com...]

Finally, if your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will know to use the new URL.

From their "Quality Guidelines": [google.com...]

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

The see a meta refresh that sends a user to a different page than listed in the index as "sneaky".

[hulahoop]

I was thinking of coming up with a new site but that means I will have to start from scratch.

I have a current site that is essentially in the same industry as the new one and want to use the traffic the current site has gained to help the new site.

what should I do? Both sites will still be up so does meta refresh help?

What is meta refresh?