Response Codes: Internal Redirection (HTTP Refresh)

Internal URLs with an HTTP refresh. This instructs the browser to ‘refresh’ to a URL with a specific time.

The target and time can be seen in the ‘HTTP Refresh’ column in the Internal tab. 0 seconds is seen as a permanent redirect by search engines.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

Use the ‘Response Codes’ tab and ‘Internal’ and ‘Redirection (HTTP Refresh)’ filters to view these URLs.

The target and time can be seen in the ‘HTTP Refresh’ column in the Internal tab. 0 seconds is seen as a permanent redirect by search engines.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when an internal URL has an HTTP refresh in the HTTP header, indicating that it ‘refreshes’ to a URL with a specific time.

Refresh: 5; url=https://example.com/

How To Fix

Ideally server-side redirects should be used for redirection and all internal links would be to canonical resolving URLs, and avoid linking to URLs that redirect.

This reduces latency of redirect hops for users, and enhanced efficiency for search engines.