Does Google 'Cached' page kill our revenue?

[irock]

Does Google 'Cached' page kill our revenue?

When surfers search on google, they enter your site thru the 'Cached' link. If that page has Adsense, surfers will be greeted with PSAs instead of relevant ads. The result is significantly lower clicks & revenue for us if most of your surfers use the 'Cached' link. For my site alone, I find that over 58% of Google traffic enter the 'Cached' page. This is why I want to bring this up to you guys.

I have already made a post at HTML/Browsers forum asking how to prevent Google from displaying 'Cached' or caching the page.
[webmasterworld.com...]

If I can do this, I could effectively force people enter the actual page with the releveant ads.

All comments/suggestions welcomed.

[Jenstar]

I have tested in the past, and the cached version of the page will begin showing targeted ads, but if the cache is updated daily, you will obviously have many more PSAs than if the cache was updated once a month or so. Do you ever see targeted via the cache?

You can prevent caching with the "no-cache" meta tag, except then it can cause visitors to be suspicious when they see the cache missing in the Google serps. Often people do this when cloaking, and they don't want Joe Public to view what the googlebot did via cache. Some have suggested that this *may* affect rankings, while others have said it definitely does not have any bearing on rankings at all. Do a site search and you'll find a lot of information on it.

58% is pretty high for entry via Google cache. My percentage is very low, so I am guessing it is an industry specific thing for people to check sites via cache before entering a site. I know others on WebmasterWorld have mentioned they always view cache first before going to the actual site's URL.

[irock]

"58% is pretty high for entry via Google cache. My percentage is very low, so I am guessing it is an industry specific thing for people to check sites via cache before entering a site. I know others on WebmasterWorld have mentioned they always view cache first before going to the actual site's URL."

Well, it's probably because of most of my visitors being techies. They know Google 'cached pages' will be loaded much faster compared to most servers. Actually, I enter sites via 'cached' link exclusively. While I know removing the 'cached' link will make people suspect of something wrong with the site, the amount of money I'm losing cannot be overlooked.

[jomaxx]

58% seems way, way, way too high to me unless the server is extremely unresponsive or down altogether.

[shrirch]

Curious, what %age of your cached visitors are using Netscape / Gecko useragents? Our cached visitor %age is about .5-1% depending on the site and most of them are Netscape / Gecko variants (guess they're more 'tech savvy').

[irock]

I haven't done this kind of stats analysis... but I don't think it's high since 89% of my visitors use IE.

[freitasm]

I'm using the non-cache meta tag simply because I think it's fair to have in mind my users will benefit more - and me too - of visiting my live site instead of the cache.