Using meta redirects - not good?

Hi - I have read that search engines and even some browsers dont like html meta redirects.

Because my homepage is quite large I find it really useful to have a quick loading index.html page that uses a meta redirect to call the main index.php file.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.mysite.ws/index.php">

This way they can read the html page for a few seconds while the php page loads.

Is there a more search engine friendly way to do this?

I could for instance use a flashfile to do the redirect but then it would not work if they didnt have flash installed - and the search engines might not like it any better.

Your advice is appreciated...

Thanks

Dan V

Hello Birdtribes, is this file uploaded as index.html? exactly how do you use this?

thanks in advance, Stuart

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.mysite.ws/index.php">

Yes I am using this as index.html

The php page takes about 16 to 20 sec to load.

The html page takes about 2 sec.

So while they read the html page the php one is downloading.

But Im sure there must be a more search engine friendly way ?

DV

You can enter your meta tags directly into your index.html code together with a description etc. No prob!

Hi Stuart ( and anyone else )

There are many experienced webmasters who say that meta refresh tags are seriously penalised by google and other engines. They used to be used as a way to scam pagerank listings among other things.

Unfortunately I cant find an alternative method that still loads the first page as a 'preloader' for the main page. htaccess redirects for instance do not achieve anything for me as they dont load the preloader page at all.

Anyone got any other suggestions?

I thought maybe to put a sitemap for google that does not include the index.html page (dont know if that would work) or to put a robots.txt entry so that somehow visitors still see the index.html page but spiders go straight to the index.php page??

Thanks

Dan V