Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Any SEO effect(s) / impact of Meta No Cache?
-
Hi SEOMoz Guys,
Hope you guys are doing well.
I've been searching online and bumped into this archived page (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/34982/meta-nocache-affect-ranking). I would like to get an updated take on this issue whether or not the meta no cache code on a page bears negative/positive or no SEO impact / effect.
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/>
Thanks!
Steve
-
Alan, thank you for this response. I was completely off base thinking of the noarchive tag and that is what my response was geared towards. Your response is dead on, and I agree, adding the noarchive tag should be fine but it may send a weak signal to Google your site may be hiding something.
-
I just had a read, about the noarchive, I found where http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017128.html
Where it is claimed that Matt Cutts has said there is no penalty, BUT, if you have spammy signals it will be another signal.
so there is some truth in it, but only if you ae already a bit spammy.
I also found this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhrZKejdmEEMatt mentioned it here. if you have been hacked, they may show he hacked page only to googlebot, so this can not be checked they also add noarchive.
so if they suspect a hack, and you have noarchive, you may have a problem, but he also stated in anouther videio that they will tell you you hhave a problem. -
Yes I am. I think you are talking of
where the syntax steve posted is for caching in the browser and proxy servers. -
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for citing another source. I'm actually doing a site audit for a client and noticed that most, if not all, of their pages have the meta no cache on the script code. To be honest, it is the first time I've come across this and was unsure if it would have any SEO impact.
Thanks again!
Steve
-
Alan, I just want to make sure we are talking about the same thing here. I believe the original question refers to cache as it appears on Google search results pages. Based on your responses it seems as if you are referring to web page cache on the site's web server. Am I mistaken?
-
Why would you take it as less trustworthy.
simply having dynamic content is reason enouth to have no cache. no-caching is widly used, you can no cache all or part of a page if anything i would say the oppersite, if you are cached you may get indexed less often.
for example you should not cache a page with sensitive data, and allow someone to click the back button at a later time and get the data.
Search results is anouther example, I am sure that google and Bing do not cache their search results.
News papers is another.
-
no it would not have any affect, no-cache is a requirement for many sites that have dynamic content. Why would SE's want to penalize you for having dynamic content.
Caching does give you faster loading times, but as someone posted from google, you have to be very slow to get flaged for slow load times and less then 1% of pages do, even then it is a small signal.
-
I am not aware of any negative SEO impact to adding the no-cache meta tag. The answer provided in the Q&A link you shared seems accurate and complete.
The Google page which discusses using no-cache clearly states "The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a Cached link in the search results."
With the above understood, I would also ask the same question from the Q&A response....why would you want to no cache your page? The only valid reasons I can think of are for a page being developed or otherwise under constant change. We don't know all aspects of Google's algorithm but I would take a non-cached page as less trustworthy then a cached page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Product Descriptions (SEO)
So I would like a few opinions. How long should a product description be? Enough to get the point across? 100 words? 800 words? Over detailed? Any advice would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | mattl990 -
Will shortening down the amount of text on my pages affect it's SEO performance?
My website has several pages with a lot of text that becomes pretty boring. I'm looking at shortening down the amount of copy on each page but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally. Will shortening down the current copy have a negative effect on my SEO performance?
On-Page Optimization | | Liquid20150 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
Meta Title Pipes and Spacing
I've been doing optimization on a clients website and want to make sure I'm maximizing my characters. Does anyone have any feedback on the spacing in between the pipes ( | ) ? IE: Internet Marketing Company | Denver SEO | Brand Name Do the spaces before and after the pipes play a role in whether the search engines can distinguish the keyword or is it all considered one word if there is no spaces such as: IE: Internet Marketing Company|Denver SEO|Brand Name Any information will be super helpful. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStreamSEO0 -
SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this: The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content) They then choose their model of car and then the engine And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Best SEO Extension/Plugin for NOPCommerce Site?
Hi I am working for a client who is using NOPCommerce. It doesn't look like they have a SEO Plugin in - although you can add meta descriptions to Products - which works fine, the Product categories have SEO components too but do not seem to work and all 'other' content /CMS pages have no SEO components whatsoever. Does anyone know of a plugin which would resolve this? (PS never used NOPCommerce before!)
On-Page Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
SEO for luxury brands!?
Hi all, It is widely known fact that you will be a bit in trouble if you will need to do SEO for luxury brand that is not willing to sacrifice design, layout etc. for SEO purposes. So basically - there is no content to optimize and there is almost no keywords to rank! 😉 Just wondering - how would be the best to approach such kind of terrible situation? Regards, Jungle
On-Page Optimization | | Jungles0 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0
