"Revisit-after" Metatag = Why use it?

[AshSEO2011]

Hi Mozfans,

Just been thinking about the robots revisit metatag, all pages on my website (200+ pages) have the following tag on them;

name="revisit-after" content="7 days" />

I'm wondering what is the purpose of the tag?

Surely isn't it best to allow robots (such as Googlebot or Bingbot) to crawl your site as often as possible so the index and rankings get updated as quickly as possible?

Thanks in advance everyone!

Ash

[Jinx14678]

At one point this was taken as a "suggestion", but I believe almost all search engines automatically ignore this nowadays.

I think even when it was a valid command, it was still more often than not ignored by Googlebot

Shane

[RyanKent]

The "revisit-after" tag has absolutely no value in HTML nor SEO. At no point of time did this tag ever have any value. There was a single search engine which was never of any significance which created this tag, but it was never adopted by Google nor anyone else.

If anyone disagrees, then I would suggest they add the following meta tag to their page:

It is no more effective then the "revisit-after" tag but at least it's original!

http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

[AshSEO2011]

Haha thanks for the example Ryan.

OK, I think I should let my web developer know, he seems to put it on all of his sites (he knows his stuff so maybe it's an old habit he's never bothered to research).

Your example prompted me to find the following page: http://www.seoconsultants.com/clueless/seo/tips/meta/

Quite a good read IMO.