Rank affected by No-Cache?

Does Rank drop when the google-no-cache tag is set?

[jitesh]

This is a surprising phenomena I am noticing for quite a few month, specially for one specific domain I have. When ever google dose not cache my home page or revert back to the one month older version ( as it is now ) my position drops in SERP. But he position of all my competitors are intact, at same point of time.

Do any one have any idea, about this problem. My home page PR is 4.

[ciml]

jitesh, it sounds like you describe changes due to the 'Everflux'. This can lead to a discrepancy with the cache. It seems odd for you to notice major differences even after several months, though.

You can learn a lot abot Everflux from this thread [webmasterworld.com].

[DaveAtIFG]

I'm seeing something similar jitesh, and I haven't seen it discussed in everflux threads yet, but I may have missed it.

I disabled Google caching for a page on 1/14. Subsequently, I saw other sites returned by the same keyword showing freshness dates of 1/16 and 1/17 and my page disappeared around that time and remains buried. It looks to me as if freshness and everflux may be based on a comparison of freshbot data to cached data.

Out of curiosity, I'm disabling caching on a few more pages to see what happens.

[jitesh]

Thanks ciml for the bookmark they were really informative. But still the problem remains the same and I cannot find any remedies in the said thread. Why only my site's position is hampered while google revert back to the old data base and why it dose not happens with the other sites in the SERP for that query. What I find is every body retaining there position except myself is gone.

What I can do to make sure that I am in the elite batch of those site which are crawled daily. I update my home page every day.

[ciml]

Interesting Dave, I haven't heard that idea. Jitesh, do you use the nosnippet meta tag [google.com]?

[Visit Thailand]

Just so you know I have added the google nocahce tag to most pages on one of our sites and it has had zero impact on SERPS.

It has now been quite a few months since the tag was added.

The only change I see is that when you have the nocache tag you do not get Fresh dates next to the SERPS but as I say the pages were and are still in the same position. In fact my hits may have even increased a little because of the tag as peopel can no longer stay chez google to see the page.

[Brett_Tabke]

I have used nocache on everything for 2+ years. I've never seen a problem with it.

In the early days (98-99), there was some talk (encouraged by myself) that there was a problem. That was incorrect, and we've been living it down since then.

[frontpage]

We update our index page daily and have daily freshbot hits on our PR6 site.

However, I just noticed that our cached page is now from November 2002 for some reason! Last week, it was a recent cache from January 2003.

We don't use any metatags to prevent archive/cache of our site.

Tres bizzare!

[lazerzubb]

frontpage, this has been mentioned more than once this month, i am not sure why they use an old cache, i think it has to do with machines breaking down (They probably have more than 15k now, not sure though)

When you see a very fresh cache that's due to to the Freshbot visit, i think there is nothing to be worry about seeing an old cache, i don't think it will do anything for either your ranking or the click trough rate for your listings in the serps.

[Visit Thailand]

An old cache could lead to fewer click throughs if people look at the cache instead of going direct to your page. If they page has changed considerably obviously the user will never know.

This is why we use the nocache tags as a) it means users always get the freshest page available and b) the have to visit the site rather than read the page on google.

[jitesh]

Jitesh, do you use the nosnippet meta tag?

Never, I never disallow any bots for indexing or catching our pages.

Do you think If modified since HTTP header had anything to do with google not catching my pages. I am yet to implement it.

[Brett_Tabke]

I doubt it is the last mod tag. That can encourage fresh bot, but should have anything to (if I understand the situation correctly) with the cache page.

[jitesh]

Ok...this is my HTTP header

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 09:34:12 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_backhand/1.2.1
Last-Modified: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 08:00:24 GMT
ETag: "2b5e74-b1a4-3e324418"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 45476
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Is there any problem with it?

[ciml]

It looks fine to me jitesh.