Any SEO effect(s) / impact of Meta No Cache?

[sjcbayona-41218]

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

[RyanKent]

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.

[AlanMosley]

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.

[AlanMosley]

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.

[RyanKent]

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?

[sjcbayona-41218]

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

[AlanMosley]

Yes I am. I think you are talking of

where the syntax steve posted is for caching in the browser and proxy servers.

[AlanMosley]

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=XhrZKejdmEE

Matt 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.

[RyanKent]

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.