This is the first of a series of posts about Google’s tools and options for webmasters – I plan to do several such posts about most popular features webmasters use as often there is misunderstanding of how these tools and features work.
Sometimes site owners believe it necessary to disable Google cache on their sites or parts of their sites, for whatever reasons (I can think of at least a couple whitehat reasons and even more blackhat reasons right away 🙂 ). But what I see every now and then is a lot of people are not doing it right. I see webmasters using something like:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”CACHE-CONTROL” CONTENT=”NO-CACHE”>
or
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”PRAGMA” CONTENT=”NO-CACHE”>
– but these are ignored by Google and we still see “Cached” in Google results next to these sites.
What really works is described here:
If you don’t want searchers to be able to access a cached version of your page, use the noarchive meta tag like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a Cached link in the search results.
There’s another helpful bit here:
To prevent all search engines from showing a “Cached” link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
To allow other search engines to show a “Cached” link, preventing only Google from displaying one, use the following tag:
<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
Note: This tag only removes the “Cached” link for the page. Google will continue to index the page and display a snippet.