Summary: The ‘revisit-after’ meta tag isn’t useful at all – don’t bother using it. There are better ways to get Google to crawl your site more often like adding new content and linking to it.
You may have stumbled across this meta tag when looking at other peoples’ websites and wondered whether you should use it:
<meta content=”3 days”>
That looks handy! Can I get Google to visit my site every 3 days then? Maybe I should say just 1 day, and see what happens!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite like that. The tag (which takes an argument of days only) isn’t supported by any major search engine and is unlikely to be in the future. It doesn’t work if included in robots.txt either. Apparently it’s specific to Vancouver Webpages searchBC and not used anywhere else.
Google comments:
“To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless <meta name=”revisit-after”> than use the <em> element!” (http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html)
Naturally you want Google to visit your site and spider your content as often as possible. The best ways of encouraging Google to visit your site are:
- Adding new, original, quality content
- Posting original mini articles around the web (article directories, blogs etc) with links to your new content
- Adding an RSS feed to your site and syndicating the content via feedburner
- Adding the new articles to your sitemap
- Having a ‘New!’ section on your homepage (as this likely will get visited more often than sub pages)
- Pinging Google blog search when you publish new articles or update your sitemap
Before pinging Google you should try to obtain some quality links to your new content from around the web. The reason is that the rate at which Google crawls your site is in relation to authority and you need good links to your content to establish authority.
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