Skip to main content

Meta refresh

Meta refresh concept

What is the Meta refresh?

The Meta refresh is a definition related to web development that is used to talk about the method with which browsers are instructed to refresh the content of a website after a specific period of time has passed, in order to show the news that is may have added.

Different temporary parameters can be adjusted to determine the refresh rate in question. Therefore, a webmaster can instruct the browsers to do it automatically, as soon as they access it, if the time frame is indicated as 0. Actually, it is sometimes applied to trick the search engine spiders and lead them to a different content which users see.

It is not something that positioning professionals advise, since if it is detected by search engines, SEO can be seriously penalized and the website loses authority and relevance, as well as losing a privileged position in the SERPs in case of having had it.

Even though it is used less and less frequently due to the consequences it brings with it, it is something quite connected to Black Hat SEO due to the function that we have previously explained, even though it is also usually used on very specific occasions if you want to redirect users to see something that may be of interest to them.

What is the Meta refresh for

The Meta refresh serves to indicate to the browser when to update or refresh what it shows on the screen on a website. It can be used to redirect visitors to completely different content or to show updates that are being implemented at the moment, something quite used in liveblogs.

Apart from this, one of the purposes with which it has been used the most in the past is to deceive search engines. Being something that remains of the browser part, the crawlers do not detect it and ignore it, indexing content that can be quite different from what the user who enters simply sees.

Meta refresh examples

To give examples of Meta refresh, since it is the internal code of any website, we are going to put the lines with which it is implemented. Let's imagine that we want a refresh every 15 seconds to be applied to the page of our online marketing agency, NeoAttack, to update the content when the user enters. This is what we would have to write as part of the source code:

Within the "head" field of the web, it would make that refresh rate be applied.

More information about Meta refresh

In case you want to get more information about the Meta refresh, as well as other related concepts and also established within the field of development and web design, take a look at everything that we link below.

R Marketing Digital