Coding Query

[Claret]

Hi,

I wondered if anyone would be able to explain to me what the following coding means and whether they are neccessary for my site?

<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
<meta name="Resource-Type" content="document" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="global" />
<meta name="Robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="Revisit-After" content="21 days" />
<meta name="Rating" content="general" />

Thanks for your help.

Clare

[fisicx]

Ignore, delete, remove. They have no value whatsoever.

They are a hangover from the wild west days of the web when there was this idea that you could catalogue everything. Then along came google and it all became irrelevant.

[JElder]

Most of these are made obsolete by a properly structured XML sitemap.

However, they will not cause any harm if you leave them in.

[Astaroth]

<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
<meta name="Resource-Type" content="document" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="global" />
<meta name="Robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="Revisit-After" content="21 days" />
<meta name="Rating" content="general" />
Expires = Tells a browser/ search engine when the page and so originally was intended for people producing a page with a finite life (eg if promoting a specific event) but 0 also became a way of telling the browser to check for a page update every time rather than just loading the locally cached version
Distribution = Where the site was to be seen (3 options of Global, Local & IU (internal use))
Robots = tells the search engine spiders if they should index the page or not and if they should follow the links that go off the page or not
Revisit-After = how often the spider should come back to look for changes
Rating = similar to a film rating - is the content inappropriate for certain age groups


As other have said, most of these are considered defunct these days as they are either covered off by the XML site map, Robots.txt file or simply no longer needed

[fisicx]

Even if you don't use a sitemap you still don't need the tags.

And I'll reiterate for the 9 millionth time - only use a site map is you really, really need to. If it's not been configured correctly it can make a right old mess of your ranking.