Metatags

Do's Dont's, Advice

[scott]

I found this on a page doing very well on Google:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="4 days">
Do any spiders actually respond to this? Or is this just smoke and mirrors?

[oilman]

smoke and mirrors man, smoke and mirrors, at least as far as the big boys go. There may be some little guys that use it but it's hardly worth the effort.

[engine]

The robots indexfollow is ok to use. The revisit tag was not used by the major engines for some time. It doesn't do any harm to include it.
in actual fact, index follow shouldn't be needed. the engine should do that anyway. What you might want is noindex follow where you don't want that page in the index but you do the links. Similarly, with index nofollow in reverse (if that makes sense).

[Brett_Tabke]

Revisit after? hmm, I wonder. I just wonder if Northern Light is using it? I'm trying to test it, but it next to impossible to tell whether it was a hit due to the tag or just a link check or normal spidering.

[rogerd]

Jumping back to the "noindex,follow" suggestion, I thought I'd add a word of caution. While this would appear to a perfect solution to use for hallways, ugly site maps, or similar pages, some SEs read this tag as "completely ignore this page". For a while, at least, AV would reject such pages at the moment of submission. Other SEs might not provide such immediate feedback, but might still ignore them.