The Meta Tag Cargo Cult
meta and head 1997 deadEleven meta tags nobody ever read, copied from page to page for a decade.
In 2026: None of these do anything, and most never did. REVISIT-AFTER in particular was invented by one small search engine, ignored by all the rest, and pasted into millions of pages anyway. Search engines say so in their own documentation.
Where it came from: Origin unclear, which is the point. Google's webmaster documentation has said for years that it ignores nearly all of these. MDN ↗
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">
<meta name="distribution" content="global">
<meta name="rating" content="general">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="classification" content="Personal Homepage">
<meta name="resource-type" content="document">
<meta name="doc-class" content="Living Document">
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 1998">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="never">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta name="generator" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<!-- The three that actually matter in 2026 -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<meta name="description" content="A real description of this page.">