Meta Tag Force Page Refresh - Good or Bad?

[RichFinnSEO]

I had recently come across a meta tag that could cause a auto refresh on a users browser when implemented.  I have been using it for a redesign and was curious if there could be any negative effects for using it, here is the code:

All input is appreciated.

Ciao,

Todd Richard

[KaneJamison]

I don't believe that tag causes an auto-refresh. Rather, it is used in combination with an auto-refresh to make sure that nothing is cached in the user's browser, which ensures that the entire page updated during the refresh.

If I recall correctly, sending "no-cache" info in the http header is a better practice that using a meta tag. To quote from http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/#META:

"Meta tags are easy to use, but aren’t very effective. That’s because they’re only honored by a few browser caches, not proxy caches (which almost never read the HTML in the document). While it may be tempting to put a Pragma: no-cache meta tag into a Web page, it won’t necessarily cause it to be kept fresh."

I couldn't say whether this would affect your page in terms of SEO, but I also don't think there's a reason to use the pragma tag anymore, so in my opinion, it's moot.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Todd,

Using the Pragma no-cache tag means that no cached content from that page will be used when a user next accesses the page; the request will go back to the origin server instead.  It's useful when you have a frequently-updated page that you don't want users to end up seeing older versions of.  It's generally considered to be a bit of an outdated tag - you may want to explore using your HTTP headers to expire content instead - but won't hurt you with the search engines (or prevent the Cached version of your page from showing up in the SERPs).  Hope that helps!