Google Webmasters Help FAQ

The “revisit-after” meta tag is often used by web-developers who have fallen prey to a myth that is only wishful-thinking.

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”5 days”>

The search-engines do not read the “revisit-after” meta tag at all. It is not respected, it’s always ignored.

The myth of the “revisit-after” meta-tag has been passed on from generation to generation, a hope, a “prayer” to the search-engine’s bot: “please come back after abc days, pretty please“. It’s one of those things that webmasters love to use, if it doesn’t help at least it doesn’t do any harm. But it just does nothing, it’s a waste of bytes that could have been better used with a link to this site.

It is so far that a SEO consultants directory automatically discards applications when it finds the meta-tag: “If your site contains any variation of the revisit-after META tag, we will decline the submission without further review.”

Also, it is explicitly mentioned in Google’s 2005 web statistics: “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 than use the <em> element!” (my emphasis)

The XML Sitemaps format allows a similar value to be supplied per URL: “changefreq“. This is the average change-frequency of the URL (in days). The net effect is similar to what webmasters wish to achieve with “revisit-after”, the search engine crawler is expected to re-crawl the URL in question with the given frequency. However, if the crawler recognizes that the change-frequency is incorrect (the page does not change that often) then this value will be ignored. It generally makes more sense to use the “lastmod” value to set the actual date of last modification for that URL. When the search engine notices that a URL has been changed, it can be crawled with a higher priority.

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