First of all, let me preface this tutorial that you should NOT use this method for redirecting traffic from one page to another. Instead see "Redirecting Traffic for Moved Pages" for better and proper ways of redirecting traffic.
So here we will show you what Meta Redirection is so that you do not accidentally do it.
Often you will need to automatically redirect the user from one page to another.
Suppose that you moved a HTML. Then you want to put up a redirection
page in the old location. When users visits the old location, they will
be automatically redirected to the new location.
Suppose you want to have both an index.html and an index.htm file at the root of your website so that user can get to it regardless of whether they typed html or htm. Instead of having the same content in both files, which causes headaches in maintaining them, we can have visitors to index.htm be automatically redirected to index.html.
And that is the example that we are going to do. In the index.htm file, we add the following meta tag to the head section of the HTML page.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://learnwebdesignonline.com/index.html" />
So that the complete HTML page might look like ...
<html>
<head>
<title>LearnWebDesignOnline.com</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://learnwebdesignonline.com/index.html" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
The http-equiv="refresh" tells the browser to refresh the page. And
content="0; url=https://learnwebdesignonline.com/index.html"
tells it to redirect to the specified URL after 0 seconds.
If you want the browser to perform the redirection after say a 10 second delay, then put 10 instead of 0 as in ...
content="10; url=https://learnwebdesignonline.com/index.html"
During the 10 second delay, you can have a text message at the body of the HTML for the user to read.
So this is what meta redirection is. And below is why you should not use it.
Meta Redirection have historically been abused by spammers and hence have now been frown upon.
Jennifer Kyrnin says on About.com that "The biggest reason why it's a bad idea to rely on meta refresh tags to redirect your customers is because spammers use them to fool search engines. ... the minute that most reputable search engines find that spammer, they remove the links from their database. And one way they find them is by looking for "meta refresh" tags."
Brian Bonini says in his article "meta http-equiv="refresh"... is highly frowned on by search engines and is commonly used by spammers. As such, THIS SHOULD BE AVOIDED."
And Steven Hargove's article says "How do you redirect using html you ask? Here is how: DON'T! Over the past 4-6 years, use of meta tag refresh redirection has been abused for uses in relation to SPAM. The result of this and other scenarios of mis-uses of it, is that when using it, that page WILL be de-indexed from every search engine."
