Does meta "Expires" tag affect website cacheing or indexing?
-
One of our client has a meta expire tag across all pages of their website.
Does that tag affect the website overall caching or indexing?
Their website pages including home page is crawled every 10 days, however the website is popular high traffic websites, receiving 240,000 visits/month.
Please advise what impact this tag will have on the website indexing and caching?
Thanks
Atomic Team
-
It's most likely that Google is ignoring this, and will continue to ignore it.
There are just too many meta tags that you can include, and Google knows they're often used manipulatively. Unless you were using the meta expiry tag a lot and completely correctly, search engines will probably ignore it. (By correctly, I mean, use it for pages that actually do expire, then cutting off internal links after this date.)
That said, it's probably best to remove this tag.
-
Hi James,
The tag mentioned in itself is wrong and hence is not taken into consideration by search engines.
The correct tag should have been
Correct Format is :- Weekday followed with Date (Day Month Year) followed with Time Format as GMT/EST . This is basically the standard RFC format
Refer - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2068/rfc2068 for more details on RFC Format.
The tag if put correctly states an indication for search engine to delete expired documents from a search engine, unless been followed with a revisit tag
So, had the correct tag would have been put in place - all the pages would have been deleted from Google Index - as the tag states that the document is expired. It's a kind of 'nofollow' indication to Google. However, most of the Search marketers do not use meta expire tag, rather
- they 301 it, if the page has become redundant
or follow it it with revisit tag to let search engines to start crawling it from specified date onwards.
-
Thanks Gagan for the reply. However, you reply is more towards where to use, whereas my query is one of our clients has already used this tag on their website. So, would it affect their website's indexing or caching? Thanks.
-
To the best of my knowledge, Ideally Meta Expires is used for an Event. Suppose there is a music show or event - it may be wise to use Meta Expires as it indicates to Google to delete the page from index when the expiry time meets.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What Website Platform would you use?
We are considering 1 maybe 3 websites (1 new 2 redesign) there are so many options with technology rolling over every 3 years it seems. Here are my obstacles: Wordpress: dynamic but easily hacked, often needs updating Joomla: attractive, but cumbersome to manage Custom: sleek and easier to manage, but gets outdated quickly Here are some variables: 80+ products, E-Commerce, Dynamic, Blog, Tons of images, SEO friendly, MUST not lose our rankings! OK, Moz friends, What do you recommend?
Web Design | | KevnJr0 -
Is it bad to have /index.php at the end of a uri?
Is it bad for SEO if traffic is directed to "http://www.example.com/someuri/index.php" instead of "http://www.example.com/someuri/" and would it be works setting up a redirect rule at htaccess level?
Web Design | | NoisyLittleMonkey1 -
Tips on website redesign on site with messy URLs?
So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing). Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency. Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot). Thanks!
Web Design | | seonubblet0 -
Title tag on Google starts with company name then :
Can someone help me and tell me why Google picks up and shows the title tag as for example: SEOmoz**: SEO Software. Simplified.** Then if you click through and look at the cache version of the page it shows the title tags as just SEO Software. Simplified. So without the SEOmoz: at the start. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.seomoz.org%2F&aq=f&oq=cache%3Awww.seomoz.org%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.3052&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Its probably something really easy and I'm going to kick myself when someone tells me but I can't figure out why?
Web Design | | i3MEDIA1 -
New Website Redesign: Any Design Comments or SEO Suggestions?
Hi! We recently launched our new website after MONTHS of work. Now that it is live, we are looking to fine tune the design and SEO efforts. This is our new website. And for reference, this is our old website. Any and all comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your help! Mike
Web Design | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Yes or No for Ampersand "&" in SEO URLs
Hi Mozzers I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs. Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using). I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution? Thanks, Chris Captivate
Web Design | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Usual time to index and rank a new site
Hi Just wondering if anyone knew how long it usually takes for a brand new site to get indexed and ranked? I launched a new site about 5 weeks ago. So far I have had 96,000 pages indexed but the majority haven't ranked particularly well or appeared. The ones that have ranked aren't ranking high even though they have better content than competitors sites... And my old domain. Do I just need to hang tight and wait till my domain authority improves? Is there anything I can do to speed up this process? cheers
Web Design | | DavidLenehan0 -
Sudden dramatic drops in SERPs along with no snippet and no cached page?
We are a very stable, time tested domain (over 15 yrs old) with thousands of stable, time tested inbound links. We are a large catalog/e commerce business and our web team has over a decade's experience with coding, seo etc. We do not engage in link exchanges, buying links etc and adhere strictly to best white hat seo practices. Our SERPs have generally been very stable for years and years. We continually update content, leverage user generated content etc, and stay abreast of important algorithm and policy changes on Google's end. On Wednesday Jan 18th, we noticed dramatic, disturbing changes to our SERPs. Our formerly very stable positions for thousands of core keywords dropped. In addition, there is no snippet in the SERPs and no cached page for these results. Webmaster tools shows our sitemap most recently successfully downloaded by Google on Jan 14th. Over the weekend and monday the 16th, our cloud hosted site experienced some downtime here and there. I suspect that the sudden issues we are seeing are being caused by one of three possibilities: 1. Google came to crawl when the site was unavailable.
Web Design | | jamestown
However, there are no messages in the account or crawl issues otherwise noted to indicate this. 2. There is a malicious link spam or other attack on our site. 3. The last week of December 2011, we went live with Schema.org rich tagging on product level pages. The testing tool validates all but the breadcrumb, which it says is not supported by Schema. Could Google be hating our Schema.org microtagging and penalizing us? I sort of doubt bc category/subcategory pages that have no such tags are among those suffering. Whats odd is that ever since we went live with Schema.org, Google has started preferring very thin content pages like video pages and articles over our product pages. This never happened in the past. the site is: www.jamestowndistributors.com Any help or ideas are greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank You DMG0