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I was sitting the other day with two Webmasters holding opposite points of view on the question of whether they wanted their sites' pages cached in the SE's.
One felt that it was a benefit to the user who could scan the cached copies of pages and that such users were better quality visitors by the time that they arrived at his site. He was also concerned that disallowing caching would hurt his rankings in the SE's (a fear I think has been proven to be groundless). Additionally, he finds it useful to be able to see what versions of his pages the SE's are carrying, especially in cases where site issues crop up. And lastly he felt that there are times that viewing cached pages helps him understand certain elements of the SE's algo's.
The other felt (assuming no rankings issues were involved) that caching serves no useful marketing purpose at all, allows competitors to snoop and perhaps gain knowledge (historical and otherwise) that he would prefer they not have access to ... without ever visiting his site. In essence, he felt he was giving up far more than he was getting.
We all know that cached pages help the SE's. The question here is, do cached pages help and/or hurt Webmasters, and how? Anyone have any thoughts on the matter, pro or con, or care to share experiences?
Also, a sidebar question: Do you think everyday users care about cached pages? Or is this a feature that only (some) Webmasters care about?
Cached pages do allow competitors some access to information that otherwise they'd have to work a little harder for... but for the most part the data would be accessible without caches. The exception would be that pages which are cloaked are more vulnerable to exposure because of the cache.
I don't believe there's any significant marketing benefit to the owner of the cached page because of pre-viewing, and there is a loss of visitor referral information that's a drag.
However, some of the benefits to SEOs/webmasters do cut both ways. I find it's helpful to know what version of my page is indexed without playing games with title punctuation or whatever I'd have to do to track them otherwise. And, what I can learn about my competitors to some extent I can also learn about my own pages. It was helpful to me, eg, to learn from the text only cache that Google is currently treating the alt text in an image link as a text anchor. While I don't know how much weight is given to that anchor, I was happy to have the info.
Also, I've used the cache to access sites that are having server problems, or which have modified pages that simply haven't yet been reindexed or properly forwarded to new urls. This in fact is my most frequent use of the cache as a surfer.
I don't have a clue what the average surfer thinks about caches. Most probably don't have the curiosity or the courage to click and find out, but that may not be fair. If they have high speed connections, I'm not sure that they'd experience any access speed difference.
All in all, I've allowed my client sites to be cached. I should add that I don't run AdSense, which might have its own set of issues.
