“Noarchive” meta tag is used when you want to prevent or remove cached pages in a search engine. This meta tag is known to work for all major search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. It is also known that “noarchive” meta tag does NOT affect your search engine rankings or indexing, but only determines whether or not search engines will cache the crawled content.

The “noarchive” metatag can be used when a website publisher charges a fee for access to its content, and thus want to prevent content theft, but still would like the content to be indexed and ranked by search engines. Also it’s useful when the content changes frequently, and it’s not desirable to keep the outdated stale content cached by search engines for human access. This meta tag is sometimes exploitted by blackhat SEO to hide their cloaking techniques.

Sites that currently use “noachive” meta tag to protect against search engine caching include:

• http://www.webmasterworld.com
• http://www.nytimes.com

These sites are indexed in Google but not cached because they have the metatag ‘noarchive’ for all robots.

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>