News came out earlier that Google would be supporting a meta tag to say a document isn’t available after a certain date. Here’s more details about that, from Google. In addition, they’re now supporting a way to report meta robots information within http headers.
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Seems a bit niche oriented to me, but there are people for whom these capabilities will be important.
Yeah, I struggled with why anyone would really need that unavailable tag when taking the page down should be enough. Don’t get me wrong -- I still love having the option. Just couldn’t think of an example. But europeforvisitors over at WebmasterWorld raised a good point in this thread: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3394134.htm "Example: A manufacturer’s rebate page with a July 30 expiration date, or an e-commerce site with a sale that ends on August 10." That’s perfect. I mean, it is a pain that this stuff will live for several days to months after it comes down. If you can tell Google not to bother with it after a set time, that’s useful. The header support is very useful if for some reason you can’t do a robots.txt file easily but have some non-HTML documents you want to block. You can’t put meta robots tags in them so this gives you an alternative. I think it will be more clear when the official help info comes online.
See also SEJ on some SEO impacts of the new tag here: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-impact-of-googles-unavailable_after-meta-tag/5333/ And already submitted to Sphinn here: http://sphinn.com/story/693