People keep blogging about the unavailable_after tag that Jill Whalen mentions after hearing Dan Crow from Google speak at SEMNE. The unavailable_after tag is apparently exciting because it tells spiders when the page can no longer be crawled. This means that if you have promotional material online, or plan on moving pages to a paid section after a period of time, you simply use the unavailable_after tag. And despite some initial skepticism about the unavailable_after tag, Google has officially commented on this robots exclusion tag.
One the hand, it appears that the unavailable_after tag seems pretty useless. This is a valid viewpoint for bloggers. A loss of backlinks and traffic does not seem an incentive to go the extra effort of putting in the tag, and really, there would be no reason to.
But for newspapers and auction sites like eBay, I can see how these will be of benefit, not only for the sites but for the search engines. This means that sites that produce many pages daily can set a time limit for how long the pages should be crawled, which means that irrelevant pages will no longer appear in Google’s search results.
Most importantly, I think this may mean something to the average Google user – in theory, irrelevant outdated pages need no longer appear in the search results which increases the chance of finding relevant information.
But will they get used? Well, I suppose only time can tell, but I look forward to watching how this tag is used by webmasters. Do you see any positive or negative repercussions of the unavailable_after tag, if any at all?
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