Google To Add “Unavailable After” META Tag
Jul 12, 2007 at 9:30am ET by Barry Schwartz
Getting Into Google by Jill Whalen reports Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, saying that Google is releasing a new META tag named “unavailable_after.”
The “unavailable_after” tag will allow you to tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page. Jill explains that this tag comes in handy when you have a limited time offer promotional page, and on this page, the promotion will expire on a specific date. By using the “unavailable_after” tag, you can tell Google that they should not crawl this page, after the promotion expires. There are several practical scenarios for this tag. We have emailed Dan Crow and others at Google for when this tag is expected to be supported.
Jill’s Getting Into Google has a lot of other useful and interesting topics, in my opinion, it is worth a full read.
Postscript: See more details in our followup post, More Info On Google’s Unavailable After Meta Tag & New X-Robots-Tag In Header Support.
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It’s a good recap and I appreciate Jill’s writing about the session. But I am increasingly concerned about the message coming from Google regarding Supplemental Results pages.
Simply removing “Supplemental Result” from the SERP listings won’t change the fact that Google only partially parses and indexes the Supplemental Results pages (a fact Matt Cutts confirmed at SMX Advanced 2007 in Seattle).
If Google does not begin fully parsing and indexing the Supplemental Results pages then they need to keep the designation visible so that users and Webmasters alike know there is something different in the data they are seeing.
Otherwise Google will be engaging in a deceptive trade practice by deliberately and intentionally misleading people regarding the way they process and present Web data information.