This post will be unavailable_after next week
People keep blogging about the after hearing Dan Crow from Google speak at SEMNE. The unavailable_after tag is apparently exciting because it tells spiders when the page can no longer be crawled. This means that if you have promotional material online, or plan on moving pages to a paid section after a period of time, you simply use the unavailable_after tag. And despite some about the unavailable_after tag, Google has officially commented on this .
One the hand, it appears that the . This is a valid viewpoint for bloggers. A loss of backlinks and traffic does not seem an incentive to go the extra effort of putting in the tag, and really, there would be no reason to.
But for newspapers and auction sites like eBay, I can see how these will be of benefit, not only for the sites but for the search engines. This means that sites that produce many pages daily can set a time limit for how long the pages should be crawled, which means that irrelevant pages will no longer appear in Google’s search results.
Most importantly, I think this may mean something to the average Google user - in theory, irrelevant outdated pages need no longer appear in the search results which increases the chance of finding relevant information.
But will they get used? Well, I suppose only time can tell, but I look forward to watching how this tag is used by webmasters. Do you see any positive or negative repercussions of the unavailable_after tag, if any at all?
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Posted: July 31st, 2007.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from
Time: July 31, 2007, 10:52 pm
I think it will be used because say someone has an event to promote that will only be available for a short time like the olympics. They register a domain for the event. After the event, the domain will obviously not be used, unless it’s an annual event. So the traffic that the domain gets will be redirected to the host or domain registrar, which will get more exposure. Most people aren’t willing to do that, like giving someone a referral count! :P
Comment from
Time: July 31, 2007, 10:54 pm
This is new to me. Very interesting.
PS. the “robots exclusion tag” link is empty.
Comment from
Time: July 31, 2007, 11:07 pm
I really can’t think of any way I’d make use of it. Maybe I’d try it just for the heck of it to see if it actually works. That’s about it :)
I said the word “it” an awful lot in this post.
Comment from
Time: July 31, 2007, 11:36 pm
As a blogger, I know for sure that I won’t use it. Don’t want to lose backlinks and such. But for big sites I see its purpose. It’ll get rid of irrevelant or dead pages that they don’t want their users landing on.
And it’s good for Google too. Having pages automatically drop off when they’re no longer important will free up a lot of space in their systems over time. Just think of all the information that’s currently stored that could go bye-bye. Tons and tons.
Shine on,
Aaron
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