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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: July 18, 2007 - 1:41 am
Posted By: todd 408 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginejournal.com)
Category: Google SEO
Of course they’re not, and Google is hoping to solve this problem through the adoption of the unavailable_after META tag.
6 Comments
Comments
We've also got more details on the new tag here:
http://searchengineland.com/070717-111517.php
And some other sphinn discussion of those going here:
http://sphinn.com/story/697
Wouldn't it be more useful to 301 those pages when they expire?? People tend to link to contests and rebates quite freely and it seems a shame to toss all that love away by expiring a page..
Thanks for the links Danny.
Feydakin makes a good point. Besides, I try not to try these "new" things that can only hurt you if you screw it up ;-)
Once I hear that my page rankings will drop if I don't use it ...then I will use it.
What about the "expires" meta tag? Strange that isn't used more. Either way would announce the expiry date of a page before it actually expires.
In any case, once a page has "gone" from the web the correct response is to send either a 404 or 410 status code in the HTTP header.
The "301" should be used only if the page has actually "moved" somewhere else.
In case of a contest it's perfectly Ok to use a 301 to redirect from the closed contest to the next one. Or leave the page outing the winner with a link to other contests. Or whatever.
If a clever 404 page can find closely related content, or can map the canonical URL, then it should do a 301 instead of a 404 or even 410 response.
Even with content hiding itself after a cpl weeks behind a login screen I'd leave an excerpt and/or summary on the login page under the original URL to attract SE traffic long term.
I've not yet seen a single example where, from a SEO perspective, this tag makes actual sense.