The Official Google Blog announced the new unavailable_after META tag a few weeks ago. This feature allows you to have more control over what Googlebot (Google’s search bot) pays attention to when it visits your site.
Let’s say you have a sale for a limited time, a temporarily available news item, or a page for a temporary promotion. This tag allows you to specify the exact date and time you want certain pages to stop being crawled and indexed. This could be especially useful as we head into the holiday shopping season.
For a sale that ends December 31, 2007 on the standard html page www.example.com/2007sale.html, you would use the following:
<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2007 23:59:59 PST”>
If this is something you would be interested in putting to use on your site, please let us know. MightyMerchant will be able to easily add these tags for you.
For more about optimizing your site for the holidays, tune in to MightyMerchant’s October 2007 SiteBeat. (Access all past SiteBeats here.)
