How To Prevent Google From Displaying Snippets And Taking Caches
The Google Blog has a great but straightforward tutorial on how to prevent snippets of text from your page being displayed on Google search results (SERPS), and even how to prevent Google from taking a cached snapshot of your entire page altogether. It involves adding a few meta tags on your pages.
To prevent Google from caching, add the following code to your page, anywhere between the <head> and <body> tags.
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
If you don’t want snippets to be taken from your site and displayed in relevant Google searches, add this.
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">
Google will then be sure to only display your site name and URL whenever it appears on relevant queries. Using NOSNIPPET actually also activates NOARCHIVE, so this means taking out snippets will also disable the link to a cached page.
These are very useful in several instances.
First, if your site content frequently changes, then a snippet might already be out of date. This is useful for blogs, for instance, in which the home page content changes everytime you post new entries (but not the static or permalink pages, which retain the content).
Also, if you rely on your site for monetization, then NOARCHIVE can be useful because Google’s archived pages might display an old archived page, and hence old ad banners or links. Having users view the cached pages will also prevent any site metrics software you may be using from accurately counting statistics (like page views or unique users).
There are disadvantages, though. The purpose of displaying snippets is so a searcher can see at a glance the context in which his keywords appear on your site. This helps in deciding whether a user will click on the link or not. As for the cache, this can be useful in the event your site goes down or there’s a massive connection problem (like the Taiwan earthquake in December 2006, which rendered a lot of sites worldwide inaccessible). Consider also traffic spikes, like when your site gets frontpaged in DIGG.com (which usually kills a server because of too much traffic). Therefore, disabling the cache may render your content inaccessible in these instances.
The statement
is wrong. Theis correct.If you want to prevent googlebot from caching your site you should write NOARCHIVE which makes sense anyway
Sorry about the double post
fixed! thanks for catching that.
what about the poor soul who isn’t a “webmaster” and needs horrible/personal statements removed from Google “snippet/cach”.. have had the 3rd party webmaser delete a hateful comment from their post.. but still comes up when my name is searched.. have asked (PLEADED) with google to remove and no luck..oh,well i did like my job while i had it.. probably loose over a horrible hate statement…