Noarchive 101 - A good idea in 2009?

[Asia_Expat]

I've been reading through a few old threads about the noarchive meta tag but nothing really recent. I have some questions, such as how the noarchive tag would affect modern SERPS, such as snippets being shown alongside Bing results when you hover etc etc... (snippets being 'good' or 'bad' based on your own views).

I'm about to throw the noarchive onto all of my pages. I'd like to see some basic info such as the correct implementation of the tag, to a thorough examination from Webmasterworld members as to why it's good and why it's bad.

At least once, I've used an offsite cache to recover a few pages I didn't have in a backup. That was a lesson learned. If search engines can't cache your content, how do they examine page content to decide rank? I know this is probably very basic stuff...

[Asia_Expat]

I seem to have a habit of starting dead threads but I'm really surprised that this one didn't attract any comment. I've had the noarchive in place for a few weeks now and the big three dropped the cache on nearly every page in less than a week.

I've seen no detrimental effects (that I can measure) and if anything, CTR seems to have improved slightly. If I'm correct about that (and it's not just a coincidence, which is very possible) I have no explanation, other than my entry looking cleaner in the SERPS now that the 'cache' link isn't there.

[Rosalind]

Bing snippets aren't affected by noarchive. Google obeys a "nosnippet" meta tag, but I'm not sure how Bing handles this.

Personally I've noticed no negative effects from using noarchive.

[phranque]

the "big 3" all support the REP as of june, 2008 including the NOSNIPPET meta tag, which isn't the same snippet as the bing mouseover snapshot.

the "Cache" on the G SERP is really a link to an archive of the page.

the NOARCHIVE meta tag doesn't affect page cacheing just as the Pragma: no-cache and Cache-Control: no-cache headers don't affect web archives.

[TheMadScientist]

I use nocache all the time and don't know why anyone wouldn't... IMO: All you do by allowing people to look at the cached version of the page is cost yourself a visitor.