How is that possible?

link back pagerank but no cache network...

[followgreg]

Hi,

I came across something weird for he past few months:

I have these guys with a huge website network that want to exchsnge links, all their links back have nice pagerank -

However, the pages where they intend to put the link back, although they always have page rank, are NEVER in Google cache!

How is that possible? I find no robots.txt of any kind, how is that possible? Am I being paranoid?

[Kelowna]

they could have this on their pages...?

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

[wheel]

Yes, you're right to be paranoid. This is almost certainly done deliberately by them. Which begs the question, why don't they want Google to cache their pages? Hmmmmm.....

[followgreg]

Yes, i think that they do it on purpose too. May be they cloak pages from Google, or i dunno what.
Is Google give PR to pages with noindex? that would not be logical?!
Anyhow there is no noindex or noarchive of any kind...at least not when I look for it with IE.

They have a bunch of link pages on their sites and it is crazy but even PR4 pages have no cache, each time they propose a link exchange...nice PR but no cache - the network is operated by an SEO company...which recently gained nice rankings.

[topsites]

Please keep in mind Google PR is over-rated and to be used only as a superficial guideline or another way to say it is, taken best with a grain of salt. Certainly google PR is an indicator of possible traffic, but I like to see other indication as well, perhaps a listing on Yahoo or a link-pop conducted with my checker, perhaps a load-time test, either way, get a good feel for it and if it doesn't feel good, likely it is best avoided.

<-begin google quote->
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query.
<-end google quote->

Thus, it is easy to gain great PR for a page designed for a never-searched term, so a page made for the search-term "I will never search for this in my whole life" can have a Google PR 5+ and get absolutely no traffic.

Ok maybe not quite, but that's the gist of it.

[followgreg]

Thanks for the explanation topsites.

However we are talking here about a link exchange which has for purpose mostly link pop, not traffic.
And the problem is to find out how this SEO related company and its huge network make page having PR but no cache at all.

[kensmithkw]

There are many reasons to not let the SE's archive your information. One is that you own the copyright to the information and many feel that the cache is a violation of this copyright.

A cache has nothing to do with PR and never will, the page only needs to be in the index. If you want an example that nobody can argue look at the NY Times website (nytimes dot com), it's a PR10 and there isn't one page that is cached.

[garyr_h]

Brett Tabke wrote a nice explanation of why not to use cache some weeks ago when webmasterworld was down. I can't find the thread anymore (or even know if it even exists because I believe it was on searchengineworld).

However, he said something to where why would you let someone copy all your content? also something to the extent of liability for user submitted content.

After I read his statement I agreed and quickly placed code on all my pages to get rid of the cache. If someone wants to see something on my site, they can click on the link and go there themselves.

Also, TBPR isn't all that important. If the link is there and no funny stuff is happening (javascript, too many links on page, rel="nofollow", etc.) go ahead and do it. A link is a link is a link...

[followgreg]

Yes...OK.... but here we are talking about link exchange pages which are specifically designed for...exchanging links and consistently have no-cache while the rest of the site has....
There is no copyright issue on link exchange pages. Also, I could not find any noarchive, noindex. nofollow tags whatsoever.
The network keeps having loads of sites with the same behavior...PR but no cache...probably a scam, just that i can't ifnd out how they did it.

[Key_Master]

It's not difficult to feed search engines spiders a meta noarchive tag.

Nothing suspicious about doing it either. I do it to keep scrapers from archiving the google cache.

[followgreg]

It IS susupicious if ever the the noarchive appears only on th elink exchange pages - However...please read the post above, tired of explaining what the issue is :)