Google's “Unavailable After” Meta tag Supported Now!

Google's Dan Crow in the official Google blog finally announces that their “Unavailable after” meta tag is finally available after informing about it a few weeks ago.

1. Unavailable_after tag : This one follows a similar syntax to other REP META tags. For example, to specify that an HTML page should be removed from the search results after 3pm Eastern Standard Time on 25th August 2007, simply add the following tag to the first section of the page:

   The date and time is specified in the RFC 850 format. This information is treated as a removal request: it will take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. We currently only support unavailable_after for Google web search results. After the removal, the page stops showing in Google search results but it is not removed from our system. If you need a page to be excised from our systems completely, including any internal copies we might have, you should use the existing URL removal tool which you can read about on our Webmaster Central blog.

2. REP META tags : The REP META tags give you useful control over how each webpage on your site is indexed. Wth this META tags so they can now be associated with any file. Simply add any supported META tag to a new X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header used to serve the file. Here are some illustrative examples:

• A cache link or snippet for this item should not be displayed in the Google search results:
  X-Robots-Tag: noarchive, nosnippet
• This document is not to be included in the Google search results:
  X-Robots-Tag: noindex
• Tell us that a document will be unavailable after 7th July 2007, 4:30pm GMT:
  X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 7 Jul 2007 16:30:00 GMT
  You can combine multiple directives in the same document. For example:
• Do not show a cached link for this document, and remove it from the index after 23rd July 2007, 3pm PST:
  X-Robots-Tag: noarchive
  X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 23 Jul 2007 15:00:00 PST.

For more on Robert Exclusion Protocol, go to Google blog.

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