July 14th, 2007
Google will soon support "Unavailable After" META tag
Barry Schwartz found an interesting article from highrankings.com that gives us some juicy details about what it takes to get a good rank on Google and what tools we can look for soon. Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, attended the annual SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England) and “spilled the beans” on some things we can expect to see.
A new META tag will soon provide a way for webmasters to have time sensitive information appear in Google results for only as long as they are needed — there are many practical applications for this including pages that may contain sale information (ie. Item is on sale until August 31st). That sale page would be absolutely useless after August 31st, so why should it remain indexed?
Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!
If you wanted to do something like this in the past, you would have needed to maintain a very large robots.txt file — which I am sure nobody would want to spend their time doing.
Of course, this tag will not be supported by other search engines right away, but it never hurts to start using it where it makes sense. I am guessing the syntax will be something along the lines of <META name=”unavailable_after” content=”Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:01 GMT”>.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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