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
-
How Much Does Punctuation of a Word Effect SEO?
I have a page on a site that is targeted for "mens hair cut" and I have received a F for the grade. The content on the page uses "men's" throughout the content. (proper punctuation) When I re-graded the page with "men's hair cut" the page received a B grade. My question is, does mens v.s men's make a different for on-page SEO? Should my targeted keywords include "men's" rather than "mens"?
On-Page Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
How will it effect SEO to have multiple h1 tags on a page?
I have a client who recieved this advice from his marketing consultant: "If there are multiple h1 tags on a page, this can confuse Google and it may have a negative impact on the keyword rankings. If you could ask your web developer to go in and remove the h1 tags on the header images that would be helpful. This way it will be easier for Google to index your site and will help your keyword rankings." How will it effect SEO to have multiple h1 tags on a page?
On-Page Optimization | | GRIP-SEO0 -
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 -
Will "internal 301s" have any effect on page rank or the way in which an SE see's our site interlinking?
We've been forced (for scalability) to completely restructure our website in terms of setting out a hierarchy. For example - the old structure : country / city / city area Where we had about 3500 nicely interlinked pages for relevant things like taxis, hotels, apartments etc in that city : We needed to change the structure to be : country / region / area / city / cityarea So as patr of the change we put in place lots of 301s for the permanent movement of pages to the new structure and then we tried to actually change the physical on-page links too. Unfortunately we have left a good 600 or 700 links that point to the old pages, but are picked up by the 301 redirect on page, so we're slowly going through them to ensure the links go to the new location directly (not via the 301). So my question is (sorry for long waffle) : Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually? Thanks for any help anyone can give.
On-Page Optimization | | TinkyWinky0 -
Do Parent Categories Hurt SEO?
I have parent categories and subcategories. Will it be harder for the subcategories to rank well because they have a parent category? The URL is longer, for one. I am just wondering if I should not have parent categories. I have one category page doing really well and I am trying to boost the others (most of which are subcategories) and this is a concern for me. Thanks! Edit: I also have a category that has 2 parent categories. I want it automatically in those 2 categories and one of its own. By itself it is very important keyword. Is this ok or should I have it be a parent category?
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Is content aggregation good SEO?
I didn't see this topic specifically addressed here: what's the current thinking on using content aggregation for SEO purposes? I'll use flavors.me as an example. Flavors.me lets you set up a domain that pulls in content from a variety of services (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, RSS, etc.). There's also a limited ability to publish unique content as well. So let's say that we've got MyDomain.com set up, and most of the content is being drawn in from other services. So there's blog posts from WordPress.com, videos from YouTube, a photo gallery from Flickr, etc. How would Google look at this scenario? Is MyDomain.com simply scraped content from the other (more authoritative) sources? Is the aggregated content perceived to "belong" to MyDomain.com or not? And most importantly, if you're aggregating a lot of content related to Topic X, will this content aggregation help MyDomain.com rank for Topic X? Looking forward to the community's thoughts. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | GOODSIR0 -
Has anyone had experience with the Wix platform and it's SEO qualities?
Wix offers an inexpensive, user friendly platform for building websites. Most of the site is flash, but Wix claims to be SEO friendly. I'm all ears for your feedback and experience with Wix.
On-Page Optimization | | ksracer0 -
Google Page Rank of my site has dropped from 4/10 to 3/10
Google Page rank of my website has been dropped after Panda Update. Can anyone help me out to tell me the possible reasons about the same. We have tried to make our website more lively and user friendly. We have indulged some graphics to make it more attractive. But it seems it backfired us. my site is http://www.myrealdata.com as well as Google page ranking of my Quickbooks hosting page has been dropped as well. It would be great if someone can help me out with expert suggestions.
On-Page Optimization | | SangeetaC1