Why (and how) to Stop Google from Caching Your Pages

Did you know…

  • People can see pages on your site that were up months ago without you knowing?
  • When you delete a page from your site, it can still be seen for months?
  • People can look through your site without showing up in your analytics?
stop caching

Learn to stop showing your website's cache.

This is all possible through the magic of Google’s caching feature.  And although website caching on Google has some benefits, it may not be a good fit for your site.  Let me tell you why (and how) I decided to stop having a cached version of my site on Google.

I’ve been watching my traffic a lot more closely lately, especially 404 errors.  I’ve noticed a lot of very funky stuff going on, especially with people (or bots) coming from cached versions of my site.  When I get a peek at some of the search terms that these people used to get to my site, it is interesting what kinds of things you learn.

If you aren’t sure what Website Caching is (in terms of search engines), check out this explanation from Google’s site:

Google automatically takes a “snapshot” of each page it crawls and archives it. This “cached” version allows a webpage to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page’s web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it, and we display a message at the top of the page to indicate that it’s a cached version. Users can access the cached version by choosing the “Cached” link on the search results page.  (As seen here)

So the only benefit of caching as far as I can tell is that a copy of your site is available in case your server goes down.  My server doesn’t go down much, so that isn’t a big bonus.  But the downsides seem to outweigh the good.

Here a little video about Caching…

I don’t want people to be able to see cached versions of my site. The cached versions could be pages or posts you deleted, are out of date, or you removed from your site for one reason or another.  I figure: If I took the pages down already, I don’t want Google showing them to people for months (years?) to come.

I would also like to know when people are looking at my site. Usually Google Analytics will give me this data, but if people are looking at cached versions of my site, then they never get counted.  They can browse my whole site (and your whole site) without you knowing about it.

So I did some searching on how to stop Google (and the other search engines) from showing a cached version of your page.  All you have to do is add:

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

to your header.  Supposedly it’s as easy as that.

So, I just added it today and of course Google has to come back through and re-index each of these pages to see the change, but I’m excited to see how this works.

Your Turn:

Do you have any experience with web caching you’d like to share?  Do you have questions about adding the meta to your site?  Are you aware of something that might happen without a cached version I didn’t think about?  Add it to the comments below…

PS:  If you liked what you saw about Thesis Theme, check out my Thesis Theme discount.

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  • I have a question for you:
    why go certain pages are indexed in google but have no cache? also why they do not apear in search results?
    what can be done about it so it will have cache?
    by the way <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE” />
    was not in any pages. see examples.
    site:www.searchenginepro.com.au/SEM
    look at pages 60-100 mostly nocahce.
  • rawwebdesign
    That's a good question. I have no
    idea why they wouldn't cache your
    site. If you consider it a
    problem, get more links. Getting
    more inbound links cures all SEO
    ails IMHO.

    brad
  • How do you do this for WordPress?
  • rawwebdesign
    With thesis you just add it to your
    header space, without thesis you
    have to edit your header.php file
    to include it.
  • I don't see a way to add it to my header space without editing the .php file. I have Thesis, but the only option I have under header is to change the title tag and add no-index to pages. My custom file editor is for CSS.
  • rawwebdesign
    Did you watch the video? It shows
    how to in there. It's under Thesis
    Options near the bottom on the left
    hand side...
  • That's what I get for reading this on my phone! I didn't realize it was a video. Duh. I'll go watch it!
  • rawwebdesign
    how does it look on your phone
    anyways? (the site i mean...)
  • Okay, watched the video and added the code!

    I'm trying to look at your site on my phone again (I have a Blackberry through Verizon) but I can't connect with it right now. It says "the server may be busy," but since your website is working perfectly the problem is THEIR server. They are just too embarrassed to admit it. I'll post again when I can see it.
  • rawwebdesign
    Awesome. Glad it worked for ya.
    RSS this site and I promise there
    will be lots of good stuff coming.

    -brad
  • Don't see an RSS button anywhere (except to subscribe to blog comments.)
  • rawwebdesign
    Oh well I'm going to have to add
    that for sure. Thanks!

    -brad
  • imjp
    nice article, i'm adding it as well. make sure to close to meta tag like this /> instead of >
  • rawwebdesign
    Good point! Forgot about that...

    Thanks.
  • I hate how we have to add tags to our pages - because of third party sites - this sort of stuff should be kept inside robots.txt or similar to prevent bandwidth waste.
  • rawwebdesign
    I agree completely. But that's the
    world we live in.
  • Makes sense to me. I just added the tag to my wordpress site.
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