Google Plans a New Meta Tag - "unavailable_after"

[tedster]

Jill Whalen reports from the third SEMNE event (Search Engine Marketing New England), that Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, gave feedback on a number of issues - including plans for a new unavailable_after meta tag that will identify time-sensitive content.

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.

[highrankings.com...]

[reseller]

Just for future reference...

Jill Whalen reports from the third SEMNE event (Search Engine Marketing New England), that Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google,..

I see the post on Official Google Blog is signed as follows:

Posted by Dan Crow, Product Manager

[g1smd]

Hmm. It uses RFC 850 date format.

Looks like no-one at Google has heard about the newer RFC 3339 standard that replaces it.

[webwhiz]

Wasn't it last year Whalen reported that adding HTML errors to your site would improve your rankings in Google?

Huh?

[tedster]

Doesn't matter for this topic - the report is accurate, and the meta tag is now live.

[jeffgroovy]

There you have it:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="unavailable_after: 25-Aug-2007 15:00:00 EST">

I hope eBay will use this to exclude auction listings that have expired.

That's an awesome idea, hopefully other huge sites will use this too. Personally I think eBay likes having those expired auctions still in the serps for traffic purposes.