« Microsoft Buys Danger, Maker of Hiptop! | Main

Do Search Engines Recognize META refresh as a 301 redirect?

This thread seems to think so!  Therefore, I intend to implement a meta refresh of zero seconds on at least some of the pages of this blog, in order to test the theory and to ultimately move this blog, meager traffic and all, to its new domain which I mentioned a few days ago.

Typepad Support assured me that just by setting up and activating the new domain here at Typepad, search engines would recognize the new domain and it would start ranking, but I am not so sure it's that easy. So what if the site begins responding to DNS in a new way? The search engines will likely see this as duplicate content.

If this meta refresh approach works, perhaps I can keep a little bit of traffic while moving to the new domain. Unfortunately, this blog would probably have to have the second (target) set of files living on another Typepad instance or on another host entirely to prevent a circular redirect.

Doing so on a sitewide basis will only require a quick template change.... I may need to sleep on this as it's a pretty big step, yet it will be very interesting to see if the engines really do look at meta refreshing as the same as a 301 redirect.

Posted on February 12, 2008 | Permalink | Tag this post with del.icio.us | This Post Now Lives Here

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.