Google “Unavailable” Meta Tag?

So, what gives with this new “meta tag” being reported by Jill Wahlen over at the High Rankings forum?

The quick summary:

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site.

My Take:
First of all, I have a hard fast rule that you wait to hear it from the source, or you test it before you buy into anything. Last year Wahlen reported that if you add errors to your site you can get better rankings in Google. She reported this without testing it and the report turned out to be a false link bait ploy.

So, take that for what it is worth.

Now, let’s discuss this. First of all, I think this meta tag isn’t needed. If the page is seasonal just do a 302 Redirect to another page (temporary redirect) or if the page is going to be killed, just do a 410 (no longer here).

I look at this, just as I do with the “nofollow” tag as a band-aid instead of addressing the real problem … and that is that bots run wild on sites and often don’t obey directions. Expand a webmaster’s reach in the Webmaster Tools section and allow us to mark which pages to remove out of the index and when. Give us more control in the console, so we can see the results. Don’t make us add another useless meta tag.

What is hilarious about this is that there already is an “expires” meta tag, but search engines don’t pay any attention to it.

Until Google officially announces it, I wouldn’t put much merit into it.