Meta Refresh Redirects

A redirect is simply a way of having visitors automatically directed to a new page, or a new website.
For instance, you may decide to move your website to a new domain name - in which case you would want to direct visitors from your old domain to your new domain. You may have a product or service which is no longer available, so you might want to re-direct visitors from the old page to the new page - or you may need to use a re-direct for a number of other reasons.

If your website makes use of URL redirects then you could potentially be finding it difficult to achieve good positions, and good traffic levels from the organic (free) search engine listings.
This is because most of the commonly used methods for re-directing are not search engine friendly.
Meta refresh, Javascript & Frame redirects, which are commonly used redirects, all can cause issues in terms of search engine friendliness.

There are multiple issues with these kinds of redirects; one is that it is technically difficult for search engines to follow these redirects to find the new page or the new website when crawling & indexing. The main issue however, is that these kinds of redirects can be abused by those engaged in "black hat" SEO techniques, in order to show one version of a page to visitors & a different version to search engines.

This is a technique known as cloaking, and as parts of the algorithm search engines use includes checking for these kinds of redirects, using them can cause negative results.

If your website currently uses non search engine friendly redirects, and you would like to find out how to change these for search engine friendly redirects, or if you're looking at ways to improve the performance of your website & you're not sure whether or not redirects is a problem with your website, then get in touch.