The NoArchive Command: Hey, What’s It Good For?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 16 of January , 2008 at 2:22 pm
You’ve heard of robots meta tags. But how do you use them? If you’ve been online for very long you likely no about robots “nofollow” tags and maybe even “noindex” tags. But what about “noarchive?” Are you familiar with that one? Should you be?
SiteProNews today published an article by Scott Buresh explaining all the different robots meta tags and when you should use them. The last one on the list is the “noarchive” tag. He hit the nail right on the head:
Finally, almost all search engines today, including Google and Yahoo, offer a cached version of a site alongside its listing that provides a snapshot of what the page used to look like. The noarchive tag, therefore, is available to be used in circumstances where there is content on your website that is of a timely nature and therefore that you might not necessarily want search engine spiders to cache for people to have access to moving forward.
To further back up his claim, he uses the example of a business that is running a timed special. When the sale or special offer is over and the time to take advantage of it has expired, you’ll likely not want future searchers pulling up that web page and finding the special. They’ll want to take advantage of it too. But you can hide that page from those searchers just by using the robots “noarchive” meta tag. It’s a good example of when to use a robots tag to keep certain information hidden.
Another example might be when your company is between CEOs, or other high ranking officials. If your VP is acting CEO until the new guy comes in then you might want to reflect that on a special page that will be visible to search engines and searchers until the new guy starts. That would be another good time to use the “noarchive” tag. You’ll likely think of a few on your own now that you know what it can do.
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