Disgusting: extra markup for search engines

Today I picked up the new Google introduces another ‘meta-tag’. First, the term ‘tag’ is wrong. And second, I don’t like extra markup for search engines.

Okey, the keywords and description metadata are in my opinion not bad at all: they say something about the page. That’s what metadata always does.

But what about this: Google recently announced that a page can include a meta element with name ‘Googlebot’ and content unavailable_after: with the date when it will be unavailable. The page will be deleted from Google’s servers within a day after that date. But Googlebot? What does that say about my web page? That I like the Googlebot? No, it says absolutely nothing about my web page.

The rel="nofollow" attribute, does that say anything? Not at all. The rel attribute is for a relation between pages. But the almighty Google says that it can be used for them to give that link no Page Rank value. The term nofollow is also crap, because Google does follow the link. I have banned these attributes from my web log some moths ago.

In my opinion are these kinds of markup not good, what do you think?

Posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 in HTML, SEO
Comments and trackbacks are welcome.

13 responses to Disgusting: extra markup for search engines

I don’t think I will use it often, but why not? It won’t harm either in my opinion. It’s nice to see Google is doing some effort to help us make the web more useful. However, the Google Webmaster Central might have been a better place to give this information.
Michiel said on July 31st, 2007.
Hi Arjan,

While I agree that too many tags clutter good code, I believe the engines can effectively band together to create universally accepted tags that will benefit webmasters and crawlers without sacrificing user experience. While I have no numbers to support this, I have to believe that 99% of web users will never know or care about the existence of these tags. Webmasters can choose to use them or not, so it’s merely an option to provide more control over your content.

Examples like the XML Sitemaps protocol (sitemaps.org) are a great example of the top search engines working together to create a standardized format rather than having to accommodate multiple versions. The engines shouldn’t start an arms race to be the most webmaster-friendly by creating their own proprietary tags, but until they can work together we get to choose which to implement and which to ignore.

Just my $.02
Andrew Miller said on July 31st, 2007.
As you both point out, there are some better options for giving search engines info about when a page needs to be deleted. I’d like the Sitemaps for that job, I think.

Of course, people will not know about this. But that’s the same as HTML for example: people will not know about that. They don’t care. But I care, as web developer, about my clean, semantic code.
Arjan Eising said on August 1st, 2007.
Yeah, isn’t Google’s own philosophy that you should build websites for visitors, not search engines? The motivation behind this new meta-property could be useful to some websites, but it should have been in the XML Sitemaps standard, because that is the interface to supply search engine spiders with additional information about pages and your site structure.
Sint said on August 2nd, 2007.
If you don’t care about google traffic to your site then you are totally free to ignore all their directives. If you are interested in putting your best foot forward for traffic referred to you by Google, then you now have additional control over how you are seen. What’s the big deal?
Jon said on August 3rd, 2007.
While I admit that the new meta tag isn’t useful for the majority of webpages, it does show that we need new ways of describing the lifeline of a page, where expires-after apparently isn’t enough.

Same goes for nofollow. They are both solutions to problems. And while they might not be the right solution in your eyes, they are the solution right now.

They’re helping webdevelopers built a better web right now. So no, they are not disgusting :)
Kilian Valkhof said on August 3rd, 2007.
Jon, my big deal is that -for the meta ‘tag’- it is only used by Google. So, why didn’t Google just add it to their Webmaster Tools. But they also could try to implement it with the Sitemaps file. Both not that hard to implement.

Kilian, it isn’t the right solution, indeed. But the could have thought about a better solution than this one. It is great they want to help webmasters, but I don’t like how they want to help is.
Arjan Eising said on August 3rd, 2007.
Don’t forget that the Sitemap is now a de facto standard, as Yahoo and Microsoft also support it. I suppose Google can’t add functionality unilaterally.
Michiel said on August 3rd, 2007.
I didn’t forget that, but they have the position to share their ideas with the other large search engine companies. If they did do that, it was better supported :)
Arjan Eising said on August 4th, 2007.
@Michiel: de facto is always a relative thing. Like all information standards, the current Sitemap standard comes with a version number, so new functionalities could be added afterwards in new versions.
The information you can put in a sitemap at the moment is very poor and I think Microsoft and Yahoo would like to know when a page will expire too. Sunsequently they could even use “Google’s” “tag” for this at the moment, but we will all agree this way to develop internet standards is not the way it should be.
Sint said on August 7th, 2007.
I have to agree I guess that they wanted you to include it in your blog. that way they know when to unindex you.
Don’t you want as many pages indexed as possible. Then why would anybody want to use this tag?
Todd
LA Headshot Photography said on August 10th, 2007.

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Disgusting: extra markup for search engines

13 responses to Disgusting: extra markup for search engines

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