Meta Tag Questions ? ? ?

[TheKman]

OK, I have a couple meta tag questions.

1. <META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="Mon, 31 Dec 2001 00:00:01 PST"> OK, I understand the concept of expires for a time sensitive event. Why would this be on a home page that doesn't appear to actually be expiring?

2. <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow"> is this necessary? Will they follow without it? What is the proper terminology when you do not want a particular page indexed?

3. <META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="4 weeks"> Will the engines/spider/robots actually do this? Or is it wishful thinking?

4. <META NAME="OWNER" CONTENT="My Name">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="My Name"> What good does this do? Is there any point to it?

5. Is there a site listing all of the possible meta tag uses and combinations?
Thanks Gang

[whkoh]

1. I don't really think this tag is very necessary, if your site is non-expiring.
2. I do not really know about the robot tags, but this http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/meta-user.html should help you.
3. This tag may work, depending on the search engine. It tells the spider how often to visit the page.
4. It defines the owner. I don't see this tag very often, so I guess that it isn't very useful.
5. This page has it all. http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/META.htm

[Ashy]

With regards to your robots tag. Yes it is worthwhile putting them in as robots do acknowledge them. If you did not want your page to be indexed then the correct syntax would be:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,follow">

The index/noindex means either index the page or don't. The follow/nofollow tell the robot whether or not to crawl through the links on the page. Hope this helps a bit.