Noarchive

Noarchive meaning in English

Noarchive

What is Noarchive?

The Noarchive value when used in a Robots meta tag or an X-Robots header, instructs Google and other search engines not to store a cached archive copy of a resource.

This means that when users use the cache: command or click to view the cached page from Google, they will not be able to do so - receiving a 404 error page instead.

So to put it very simply: using noarchive should remove the web-page from the Google cache.

Examples

Below is an example of a noarchive value being applied to all bots via a robots meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Below is the same instruction, but applied specifically to Google:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive" />Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Does using noarchive affect SEO?

According to Google, no, in theory using noarchive does not affect the SEO of a web-page.

It will affect how the page is shown in search results - in the sense that a cached version of the site is not available to searchers - but it should not affect the position of the page in Google's rankings.

The following tweeted reply from John Mu confirms this. In response to the question:

Hi John, does using the noarchive tag on pages negatively affect Google rankings for those pages?

John replies:

No.

Citation URL

https://www.searchcandy.uk/seo/seo-glossary/noarchive/

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