Still ok to use

[Peter2468]

This is the flag to prevent google storing a copy of your webpage.

I want to use it for good reasons but in 2013 is it still safe to use. My websites not spammy but it's still very fresh with little to no links.

Each item I sell takes a lot of research to both buy and sell with the correct info. Once it's sold one I may just come across another and  want to hold my advantage of having already done my research and my sold price to myself. Competitors will easily find my old page from a long tail search.  Some off my old sold pages keep getting hits and high bounce rates from people using it as reasearch and price benchmark. I want to stop this.

So, No archive first, then 301 to category page once sold. Will the two cause a problem in googles eyes?

[RohitPalit]

The behaviour might seem artificial to them. I have seen people use the 'noarchive' tag, but only when they want to speed up the removal (from Google index) process. Plus, I didn't entirely get what you're trying to achieve.

[Peter2468]

Yes, I agree , it would look artificial, which is what worries me.

What I am trying to achieve is normal and full indexing of an item page and normal coverage so people can find it.

However, once it is sold I want to remove the page as I don't want competitors to come across the page via a keyword search and then request the original cache copy with price and info from the search results.

I assumed pages hang around a while and can be found via cache, so once I remove or 301 the page that needs to make the old page information inaccessible immediately.

[john4math]

I don't see any problem with putting a noarchive on your page.  We do it on all of our skill pages, because those pages get their content via AJAX, and as such appear broken when viewing the cached versions.  Doing this should not have any effect on your rankings.

301 redirecting pages that are no longer used to another (hopefully) relevant page on your site is a very common tactic and is a best practice, so I wouldn't be worried about that either.

The wayback machine will still archive your content, and your competitors may look it up there.  If you want to keep your old pages out of their index, you'll need to disallow their crawler in your robots.txt, and keep it from visiting those pages, or your entire site.  There's info on that here.

[Peter2468]

Thank you,

That put my mind at rest.

I was also concerned about the wayback as I have used it many times to find out details of an old page when the google cache doesn't show me what I need.  So an extra thank you for that info link as well.