No cache for Google - any problems? good idea?

[Onders]

Hi guys, I'm in the middle of a major website overhaul, and am going to have a completely new branded and designed homepage with a few new extra features. I was wondering on the advantages and disadvantages of stopping Google from caching my pages.. any input would be welcome!
Will Google punish me or flag my site? Is the benefit of people not being able to view an outdated version more important?
Thanks

[Onders]

Should probably clarify that as I haven't explained it well! When the change over occurs to the new site I do not want people to find the old outdated version, which may still be available in cache. Hope this is clearer! Thanks

[trinorthlighting]

If the url's are not changing I would not do a thing with the google cache. People do not use the google cache for the most part. The google cache will slowly update over time with the new information.

Now, if you are changing URL's this could have a negative short term effect. Old and outdated urls will return a 404 and google does not like that. If you have any outdated url's I would look into the google remove outdated link process to update the data base. Its a very easy process and google will remove those urls in 5 days. I just did it with my site and it worked out well.

Google will crawl the new url and it will take time to make it in the index. Add a google sitemap so it will make it easier for google to crawl and let google know about the changes.

[Onders]

Thanks a lot for that advice - I'll go with that and get a google sitemap going!