Removing Your Content From Google’s Cache
Google’s cache can be a very useful tool if you encounter any of the following problems with the sites linked in a search result:
- The site has gone offline.
- There is network or server congestion and the site you want to view cannot be served.
- The page or site has updated to a new version, and the content you’re looking for is not there.
- You are connected via a proxy server, and the site you intend to view is blocked.
Just clicking on the cached link brings you to a snapshot of the page you want to read. For PDF file results, you can read a text-only version of the content. This can also be useful if you’re a bit slow in bandwidth.
However, from a webmaster’s point of view, there may be reasons why one wouldn’t want his website or page to be cached. For instance, the page may be frequently updated, and you wouldn’t want just the old content to be read (so you force readers to read the actual site and not just the cache). Or, for security reasons you may want to make sure that you have control over how long your content stays online.
One way of keeping your content from being cached by Google’s indexes is by including the following HTML tag within the <head> section of your website or page:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
When Google’s crawlers go through your site, they will index it, but will not archive the page in their cache.
Or, if you only want to exclude Google’s cache, but not other search engines, use:
<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
However, there may be instances when you’ve already published some content on the Web, and Google has already indexed and archived it. This means your site already has a cached version. But when you take down that page or site, Google still has the content in its cache.
You can manually request Google to remove your site from its index, via the Webmaster Tools. You can request for your page to be removed from Google’s index. But your page would have to actually be offline, inaccessible, or displaying a 404 error message before Google would remove it from the cache.
If you would rather not have Google cache your page, then you would have to have it delisted from the index altogether. Here are a few tips from our archives on how you can do that.
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nice one Peter!
I’ve used the tool Google offers http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals to remove undesirable and outdated (404 not found) links from Google Images and Google web searches, however the thumbnail pics still appear in queries for this search term? Can you help me address this problem so that a pic from google images can be truly removed (from both web and thumbnail cache?)