Details About The Noarchive meta tag
Whether you know or don’t know anything about search engine optimization or SEO, it is always advisable to have a few necessary meta tags in your header section which sends out some instruction to the search engine crawler robots. Among many meta tags, noarchive meta tag is quite an interesting piece of thing. So is the noodp meta tag. Here in this post, I’ll discuss the noarchive meta tag in brief.
First of all, have you noticed in search engine result pages or SERPs, a particular link called cached appears next to the URL of the page in case of some websites? This cached link doesn’t appear for every website. Have a look into the screenshot picture above. In the last result, you can see the ‘cached’ link beside the website URL, but this link is missing in the upper to result URLs.
What is this ‘cached’ link? If you press it, Google presents you a cached/stored version of a web page from their own servers. The date of that web page is normally dated a few days back and is not current. Googlebot grabs snapshots of a web page during crawling and stores in Google’s servers which is later presented in SERPs with that ‘cached’ link.
In the robots meta tag, if we mention ‘noarchive’ parameter, then robots do not grab these snapshots of our web pages and thus the ‘cached’ link also doesn’t appear in the result pages where our website appears. That is what you’re seeing in the picture above. This website has noarchive parameter stated in the robots meta tag. Noarchive is not a separate meta tag, it is mentioned within the robots meta tag. It is there we tell the robots not to take snapshots of our web pages.
Why do we require this, you may ask. Well, if you have a website which updates rapidly, then a back dated older version of web page appearing in Google’s servers would put a link beside your website’s URL in Google SERPs. A webmaster may not want this to happen, the noarchive parameter is the answer in this situation. As for me personally, and many of you also might like this idea, I do not want traces of my website’s pages cached in Google’s servers. To me, it’s like my content appearing in another server. Why would I allow it, simply because of Google’s server? Would you or I ever allow it if someone else did this? The answer is ‘no’, and that’s why I personally mention ‘noarchive’ in all my website/blog header section.
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