Uncovered Expires Meta Tag

The Meta Expires tag defines the expiration date and time of the document that is being indexed. It has been said that the Meta Expires tag is helpful for when you are running a limited time event/offer or if there is a preset date when your document will no longer be valid. Once you have reached the listed date, the search engines are then supposed to delete your web page from their database.

The Meta Expires tag is commonly used in conjunction with the Revisit After Tag as a means to get search engines to come back to your website every few days.

Meta Expires Tag Example ::

The following are examples of how you can use the Meta Expires tag.

Note: Time zone must be stated in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) not EST, PST or other.

Use the following Meta Expires tag to expire content immediately:

The above Meta Expires tag is also said to disable caching so that search engines will load a new copy of the site from the server every time an end user visits the site.

Recommendations ::

It is recommended that you do not use the Meta Expires tag. If you are looking for a way to stop Google from caching your site the Meta Expires tag will not do this for you. While the concept is good, it is impractical for the search engines. Google will still cache your web page even if you have chosen to use the Meta Expires tag. According to my testing both search engines and browsers will ignore the Meta Expires tag completely, just like you should do. The Meta Expires tag is worthless and needs to be expired from use.

If you'd like Google to stop caching your web page then use the following code:

Note: The above tag belongs with your other Meta tags that you've entered at the top of your page as well.

Here is an article from Search Engine Roundtable posted on March 21, 2005:

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Expired HTML Pages beating me out discusses one member, being upset that documents that are represented as being expired as ranking above his site. There is an expires meta tag that looks somewhat like

So should Google and other engines use this data to determine if a page should not be in the top results? As Phil Craven points out in the thread, "I've never heard of Google dropping pages because of a meta "expires" tag. They do use "last modified" information to speed up crawling, but not when it's in the page itself."

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