Blank Google Cache

Does this indicate cloaking or other SEO techniques?

[xbase234]

Been noticing lately that many of my competitor's cache's are empty in the Google SERP's. Are they using cloaking or other techniques?

Any info is appreciated.

[NameNick]

Perhaps they use this meta tag:

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

It prevents the caching.

NN

[Rumbas]

The use of frames will show a blank cache as well.

[Powdork]

Sometimes frames will cause the cache to be empty. Other times it will produce unpredictable results. For a while I had a site in frames and it redirected to google uk when you tried to view the cache. If the google listing points to a frame rather than the frameset than the frame should appear in the cache just as a regular page unless there is some sort of redirect to the frameset.
The meta nosnippet tag also works as noarchive

[NameNick]

Hey NameNick,

if a website contains the noarchive meta tag google will not cache the site and the cache link does not appear next to the SERs.

Rumbas is right. Frames probably cause the blank cache's.

NN

[Top]

Try viewing the source code on those blank pages. I had to grab some html code from a friends web site that they no longer had access to due to a squabble with the person hosting it. So I went to google cache in hopes of getting the page but it was blank. But when I used the view source function on my browser the code showed up. Hope this helps.

Peace

[xbase234]

Thanks everyone - this clears a lot of things up.