lammert - 11:32 am on Jan 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

I am not even sure a "nocache" or "noarchive" will prevent Google to cache a page as these tags apply to proxy servers and not to search engines.

Google--as all other major search engines--recognize the noarchive attribute. Technically spoken they will still store a copy of the page on their own system, but they won't make this copy available to the user.

I also do not see any advantages for a webmaster to put a "nocache" or "noarchive" for a link page ... that is supposed to be entirely static.

Lots of scraping is done by scraping the cache of the search engines, not the pages of a website itself. If you have assembled a high quality links page (not one of those huge reciprocal link directories where you don't want your website to appear anyway), you may want to protect your work from being scraped by denying the search engines to display the cached version.