Google noarchive is it good or bad

[tommyleef]

They say in webmaster info that asking googlebots to noarcvive will not hurt your results. The reasoning for asking this is 2 fold, google takes forever to update cached versions and I had a scam 'SEO' guy use things I am lucky I wasn't punished for...my site is now clean and I want a clean cache...is googlebot noarchive good or bad?

[troels nybo nielsen]

There are differing opinions as to the consequences of noarchive. I personally tend to think that it does not harm your rankings, but you loose your fresh tags. And in some cases it may take a long time before those caches actually disappear. I have pages that have been spidered weeks ago with their noarchive tags but still are presented in SERPs with cache and old descriptions.

[tommyleef]

Currently I have no cache showing now in Google...This happened today after noticing that a deep googlebot crawl has been going on since Friday...I am hopeful that the chache will not reappear and I can remove the noarchive command from here forward and have a fresh one from this point...HOPING because I have good results in a competitive category and do not want to slip after climbing steady for 8 months...

[tommyleef]

One other note...over time I have made huge gains in hit popularity...I now am the 2nd most visited site in the category I most want top 10 ranking in...the closest I have gotten is 15th...how much does actual popularity (as calculated in Alexa) factor in ranking? I have a PR of 5 and sites with a PR of 4 are in positions 3 and 4 above me--this is frustrating to say the least...I further have great inbound links among top sites in the related field...when you have things going in the right direction like this--how long is it before Google rewards with those coveted TOP TOP spots?

[troels nybo nielsen]

> how much does actual popularity (as calculated in Alexa) factor in ranking?

I don't know if it influences your rankings with Google at all. I tend to doubt it.

> how long is it before Google rewards with those coveted TOP TOP spots?

It may be a very long and slow proces. But you may also suddenly jump forward without really understanding which of your improvements made the difference. Keep up the good work.

[tommyleef]

Thanks for the sound advice...I guess considering we just started 9 months ago and already are on first page Yahoo results with 400,000 pages coming up--I should be happy.

BUT, you know how that goes, you get near the top and the competitive nature kicks in and you want TOP TOP :)

[troels nybo nielsen]

One more sound advice: Take a good look around on your site for all kinds of weaknesses and then do something serious about them. After that you may find it easier to get even stronger where you are already strong.

And keep an eye on those caches at the next update.

[DaveAtIFG]

I added <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
to a couple sites on 1/14. On 1/15, other sites displayed in the search results showed a "freshness" date of 1/15 and my sites were buried. I planned to wait for at least two complete update cycles before removing the tag. On 2/15 the sites reappeared in the SERPs with rankings similar to pre-tag rankings. Since 2/15, these sites retain expected rankings but don't show freshness dates. Both sites are still getting freshbot visits. "NOARCHIVE" only seems to hurt for a little while. :)

[troels nybo nielsen]

Yep, those missing fresh tags seem to be the only problem. I wonder if it has any influence on the CTR.