One of the major issues plaguing search engines right now is the growing list of web documents available online. While no exact numbers are available, there are billions of search results to sort through. But, they can’t all be relevant both on material content and time — can they?
Of course they’re not, and Google is hoping to solve this problem through the adoption of the unavailable_after META tag.
6 Comments
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.