Is a zero second meta refresh tag to 301 a Blogger post a proper solution?

Question

Blogger does not offer a possibility to 301 redirect a post (or the whole blog) to an external domain name (say mydomain.com). One is suggesting to use some zero second meta refresh tags in the header to solve this issue.

Is this practice accepted by Google and other search engines regarding SEO? Will the PageRank and signals coming to the old post be transferred to the new post on mydomain.com?

REM: Setting mydomain.com as the domain name of my Blogger blog is not an option. I am also aware about the Javascript solution, but this is not accepted by Google. Alternative solutions are also welcome is they are valid for a SEO point of vue.

P.S.: It has been a bit more than 2 weeks that I use this method and Google does not complain. Links are forwarded properly when I check in the Google Search Console.

Answer 1

HTML META refresh is not a 301 redirect

While the outcome is the same they are technically very different because of the header status return. A meta refresh will return 200 OK header response, while a proper redirect will return the 301 Moved Permanently header status.

HTML Meta Refresh is Supported

As far as I know Bing and Yahoo treat meta refresh similar to that of a 301 redirect. Google's @JohnMueller(G+, Pro Webmasters) recently posted a search-engine guide to 301, 302, 307, & other redirects. He mentions that JavaScript meta refresh's are discouraged, and within the guide doesn't talk about HTML based meta refesh until a user mentions it in a comment.

Disa Johnson Apr 7, 2016+

Inktomi treated meta refresh content=0 as 301 in the old days. Too bad G & John say 'not recommended' though understandable to an extent I guess. Still, I would rather have the option in case it's needed on occasion.

John Mueller Apr 8, 2016+

+Disa Johnson We support meta refresh too, I don't see that going away. The W3C has been discouraging them since 2000 ( https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#auto-page-refresh ), and we regularly see sites mess up with them (eg, auto-refresh after some time to increase page-views), so if there's a choice, I'd prefer sites use one of the other supported types.

However... this isn't to say that Google rewards the same, this will likely never be confirmed or denied.