No cache meta tags

Does it help Google get back and reindex faster?

[kokopoko]

I saw these meta tags on a site and am trying to figure out their benefit. These meta tags are on the home page, product pages, every page of the site.

Will it cause search engine bots to come back and index pages faster? Will it cause slower page loading in browsers if nothing is cached?

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"/>

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache,no-store,must-revalidate"/>

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0"/>

[phranque]

one possible reason for this is that the webmaster didn't have access to the configuration of those HTTP Response headers, so they implemented the meta http-equiv elements and hoped for the best.

another reason would be taking a "belt and suspenders" approach.
if the document is cached despite the HTTP Response headers, perhaps the next time the document is served it wouldn't be cached downstream.
note that HTTP headers don't necessarily get cached with the document, so the meta http-equiv can be helpful here.

[not2easy]

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"/> is pretty ineffective today. It hasn't worked in IE since 5. People using it may think it does something for them that it is not doing. I had it in a few pages back in 2002 I guess.