Search Engine Journal

Another interesting thread at WebmasterWorld discusses the pros and cons of Google cache for website owners. Google cache might be helpful for surfers but for webmasters it sometimes turns out to be “real poison”:

It is being scraped, regurgitated, redirected, cloaked, you name it. So why would I as a website owner want to allow that to happen?

Thus some (I dare not say “many”) webmasters choose to ban Google from republishing their sites content using NOARCHIVE metatag:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

or

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

When and why would you want to prevent Google from saving and showing your pages?

• To prevent scrapers from “ripping your site out of Google”;
• For eCommerce sites (e.g. pricing could change);
• For paid membership sites (we do remember some cases of misunderstandings between popular paid membership sites and Google because of that).

Can you get penalized for using noarchive on your pages? - Apparently, no. But some people treat sites with unavailable cache version with suspicion: “when I see pages not cached my first thought is that they’re cloaking“. SEO rumors never stop, and one of them has it, that noarchive used to be a red flag - I personally don’t think so. Officially, Google also states, there’s nothing wrong with webmasters using the tag:

This tag only removes the “Cached” link for the page. Google will continue to index the page and display a snippet.

What’s good about Google caching your pages?

• People can access your pages even if your site is down;
• Google also provides “text only” version of the page that gives an idea how it “sees” your page.