Revisit-After

[jrai]

Hi all-

Can anyone tell me what the big issue is these days with the use of the revisit-after META tag? I don't seem to recall this being a problem years before, but I've seen it come up a few times when listing in directories and what-have-you that certain sites aren't allowing it. Could anyone fill me in?

[Jean-Luc]

What do you expect from this revisit-after ? As far as I know, it is useless. Search engine robots come when they decide to come and they don't care about this meta tag.

Jean-Luc

[wige]

All I know is that search engines completely ignore this tag. Google has even explicitly said so:


and revisit-after, supposedly used to tell search engines how often to recrawl the page. To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless <meta name="revisit-after"> than use the <em> element!


From Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics: Metadata (http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html)

[Dubbya]

Yup, Wige is right on the money. The revisit meta tag is totally useless and completely redundant, furthermore, the "index-follow" tag is redundant for the simple fact that following links and spidering pages is what the spiders do by nature. It's their sole purpose.

When I make suggestions regarding meta tag optimization, the "revisit-after" and "index-follow" meta tags are the first tags I recommend be removed.

My thinking is, that if you want the SE's to spider your pages, don't put anything in the code that is unnecessary and do everything you can to give the spiders high quality, relevant content.

.02