When I read Jill Whelan’s excellent High Rankings Advisor newsletter last night, she had a surprise from Google: a way to tell search engines when your page is out-of-date and should be removed from the results. Don’t know why you would use this? For many search marketers, it is a godsend.
Here’s why.
Many Web pages are time-sensitive. For example, your company may be sponsoring a Webinar on July 27. There’s no point in showing that page on July 28, right? So you remove that page. Simple, right? Well, no. That page is still in the search indexes generating search results which result in “page not found” on your site.
That’s a bad experience for searchers and doesn’t do much for you either.
You get the same problems for the page for your March Madness sale. On April 1, it’s April Fool’s for the search engines, because your page is found but can’t be displayed.
Anytime you have a time-sensitive page, merely removing it from your site doesn’t help until the search spider comes back to your site and sees it’s gone. Only then will it come out of the search results—days or even weeks later.
Google wants to solve that problem by giving you a new tag to use on time-sensitive pages that alerts Google to throw away the page after a certain date. Called the “unavailable_after” tag, Google has not yet announced when it will be supported and no other search engines have followed suit with their own support.
For some marketers, it’s a good idea to use that tag. The marketers who will benefit are those that would still retain that search result position, but get a better page in there (one that still exists). That way instead of showing a page that will not be found, Google will bring in another page from their site that might get customers to buy something.
But what about when taking your page off the results screen results in some other company’s page going up in its place? Why would a search marketer want to cede that space? I don’t see why savvy search marketers would want to do this, personally.
A better approach would be to change the content of the page to something that is still a good answer to the question, but is currently valid. So update your Webinar page with a podcast of the completed Webinar, or with a schedule for when that topic will be done again. Update your sale page to show your “everyday low price” for your product or show your current sale. Sometimes there isn’t a good match, but often there is—don’t just take down the page.
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