I am interested in couple aspects
Could you back this up as even Google example of meta redirect contain tag.
- if it’s HTML5 then no HTML tag and HEAD tag are needed
Re this, that probably make sense. I was thinking about experimenting with meta redirect and when I found this post I finally decided to do this, and adding lang to href was one of implementation of custom meta redirect that I want to try.
- lang attributes make no sense if the only function of the page is to redirect to another page. There is no content!
From above Google website. This is why canonical may not be used all time, but Google algorithms may need that.
"While your users generally won’t be able to tell the difference between the different types of redirects, Google Search uses redirects as a strong or weak signal that the redirect target should be canonical. "
- canonical tag is useless because a meta-refresh is a 301 redirect which means the page is never indexed
As mentioned earlier, 301 are server side, meta redirects are client, browser. Depend whatw possible and available, despite that this is least recommended method, it still quite usefull and this is the way how aliases are working in Hugo.
- robots tags are useless because a meta-refresh is a 301 redirect which means the page is never indexed
From ahrefs.com: “Although Google might not be using the HTML lang attribute today, other search engines and browsers do.” In most scenarios this is not needed, but better to have than don’t…
- charset is useless for a page without content.