Cache Control tags and Google

[Brett_Tabke]

One of the longer standing debates I've been in on both some mozilla lists and in Opera groups, was if browsers should honor the expires and cache control http-equive meta-tags:

META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"
META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" CONTENT="no-cache"
META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache" CONTENT="no store"
META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0"

Originally, these are intended to be parsed by a web or cache server to set http headers as they are going out the door. Some browsers however, are reading them and obeying them.

Last month while debating (ok, it broke out into a war with religious overtones) the issue, I tested the tags on Google.

Has anyone here been using the above tags? What has been your thoughts on them ;-)

[msgraph]

Do you mean for Google's listing of the cached page or for the actual browser reading and obeying it?

META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" CONTENT="no-cache"

Checked through some sites that have this tag in them and all except one have the cached page in Google.

I'm not sure why one of them doesn't have it in there. The link to the cached page shows up but when you click on it, you get a page saying that the page cannot be found.

Google flushed it...

Or they accepted this tag in the past when this page was included a long time ago therefore it is not showing up...

[stuart]

I was looking to use this tag on pages that use 30 optimized gifs (20 are repeats of 2) and 10 small jpegs (regularly updated).

<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-store,max-age=-1">

As most of the jpegs and gifs may already be in the visitors cache would it be slowing things down too much ? TIA for any thoughts.

[sevraypr]

We have dozens of well placed info pages in Google.... on many domains. We started using the <meta name="robots" content= "noarchive"> about 4 months ago.... Since then none of these pages have been cached, while all the previous cloaked cached pages are there for the world to see....
Hope this helps....