Meta Refresh Issues

[VanessaBurton18f]

Hi,

Can you give me more insight to what might be causing a Meta Refresh?

I’m seeing this is where most of my redirect issues are coming from, but I’m not sure how to go about fixing them.

Thanks!

[tawnycase]

Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here!

A meta refresh is caused by some meta tag elements in your site's source code. You can read up on meta refreshes over here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh#Examples
There are even some handy examples of what the code might look like!

It also looks like Donna Duncan has beat me to the punch here — that's excellent insight into how you might go about fixing the issue!

I hope that helps, but if you still have questions, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to answer them all.

[DonnaDuncan]

A meta refresh can be used as a back-handed way to redirect one page to another. It works but causes a delay in the page rendering which is considered a poor user experience and therefore typically tagged as a warning.

What causes a meta refresh? You probably have a meta refresh tag in the header section of your code. It would look something like this - . "30" means wait 30 seconds before doing anything. The URL listed after that is the page you want the website visitor redirected to.

How to fix? Get rid of the meta refresh tag and replace it with a 301 redirect. Here's Moz's help page on 301 redirects. https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Does that answer your question?