Benefits of (or not) <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

[classifieds]

Is there a situation where you would you not want Google to have a cached copy of a page but still want the page in the index?

re: <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

[tedster]

How about pages where prices change? Someone can order through a cached page and claim an out of date price.

[encyclo]

Is there a situation that you would want Google to display a complete copy of your page on their site, but with their logo and branding at the top?

The noarchive meta tag has no influence on ranking, and it helps keep your content on your site, not on theirs. You might be interested in this earlier thread [webmasterworld.com] about the Google cache.

[moTi]

currently i have put noarchive on half of of my pages.
i do not want, that visitors get outdated information on certain news subjects. if i remove content, e.g. because someone complained about it, i do not wish that people refer to the cache.
in addition there is the copyright issue with cached pages, which i think is not fought out. and a little bit of feeling to secure my unique content.

by the way, i could not assess, that noarchive hurts serp ranking. however i'm not sure what the effect is on visitor count. how many users surf google by caches? i for one do it mostly. a sufer who is used to click on the cache link (because the searched keywords are nicely marked in the text then) would probably avoid non-cached serp results and click elsewhere. so you would earn less with your adsense, for instance.

[Lorel]

I find archived pages very helpful because I make browser copies of the cached pages after new pages go online in case they are ever copied, then I have 3rd party proof when the original was online because Google adds a date to their cache.

Also if you site is ever hijacked you can often click on the link with a redirect on it and see the hijacker's site in the cache which is also helpful when reporting this to Google or hijacker's host.

[classifieds]

I saw the story on the G lawsuit but didn't dig into what it really meant. Thanks for the link.

Having access to the cached pages helped during the Supplemental Hell debacle but one of my largest competitors uses "no cache" and ranks really well (they have several million pages in the index).

I'm rolling out some new sites in the next 4 weeks and was considering using "no cache" at the very beginning but not if it was going to cause other problems. . .

Thanks.

[encyclo]

in case they are ever copied, then I have 3rd party proof when the original was online because Google adds a date to their cache.

The Google cache can never be proof of anything - firstly, with locally-saved copies it is easy to simply edit the file and add any date you want, or even to fake the document completely.

Secondly, even a Google cache "proof" that could be verified merely indicates which version was indexed first - which is meaningless in terms of ownership. I could publish a copy of the Da Vinci Code online and be the first to do so, but it doesn't mean I'm the author or that I have permission from the copyright holder to do so.