Google Cache – Why You May Want To Avoid It

Sites will take extraordinary steps to get every possible page into Google to enhance their page rank. In the case of the Google cache, this tactic can sometimes come back to haunt sites, particularly sites selling products.

Google Cache

Google copies everything it can get its dirty little spider robot on. Google stores these copies in a cache. The cache is simply a copy of all previous web pages for the link in question. If you search for something on Google, each result returned for the search has a “cached” button at the end of the link. Click the “cached” link and you will see previous copy of the page. Often, what you see is an older version of the page.

If you sell products on your site, do you really want Google copying old pages and making them available? Put another way, do you really want customers to see the old prices of the products you are selling? Many sites change prices or information during the year as a reflection of selling cycles, etc. If your prices are at their high point in September, do you want customers clicking the cache link and seeing lower prices listed from July? Probably not.

Don’t Get Cached!

Keeping Google and other search engines from copying your pages is fairly simple. It requires a bit of meta tagging, but nothing difficult. To stop the process, simply add the following meta tag to your site:

The robots for all search engines relying on meta tags should stop copying your site. Lately, YahooSlurp has been acting odd, so make sure you keep an eye on it after it crawls your site.

To get rid of pages that have already been copied, you should just contact the search engine in question. They will usually delete the copies, but they aren’t particularly quick.

Adding pages to Google, Yahoo, MSN and any other search engine should be a definite goal for every site. Before storming down that road, just make sure you understand the consequences of old pages appearing in the cache.

Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com- an Internet marketing and advertising company. To read more marketing articles, visit MarketingTitan.com.