Google to launch new webmaster tag

Link: Google to launch new webmaster tag
Filed under: Google News, Webmaster News, Internet News

Google have revealed that they are introducing a new tag for webmasters to use, to prevent Google displaying temporary webpages.

Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, while speaking at a presentation in New England, revealed that Google planned to launch the new tag - currently known as “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling.

The aim is to prevent Google returning results such as competitions, or special offers on ecommerce sites, which expire after a short while.

The tag is expected to be treated like a meta-tag, which can be inserted in the header section of a page, containing a date after which Google should no longer return the document to users of its search engine.

Google already support a number of unique tags for webmasters to use.

Most controversially is the “nofollow” tag, which could be used either in a HTML link or else in the page header, supposedly to tell search engines to ignore such links.

Ostensibly to prevent blog spamming, nofollow was publicly supported by Google, Yahoo, and MSN, as well as popular blog publishers. However, not only has the tag utterly failed to impact the volume of blog spam, it has also been extensively abused by webmasters who worry that they may lose out on “link juice” if they link to other sites.

Other tags that Google additionally support include “nosnippet” and “noarchive”. Nosnippet tells Google not to publish an extract of the site as a description in their search engine listings, while “noarchive” works like “nocache” to tell Google not to store a cached version of the page in question. Both of these tags have key applications in helping protect copyright for webmasters.