Noarchive

What Is Noarchive?

Noarchive is particularly relevant for websites with frequently changing content like price comparison sites or time-limited offers. It prevents users from seeing outdated information through Google’s cache. Along with noindex and nosnippet, it belongs to the meta robots directives you can use to control how your pages appear in Google.

Noarchive is a meta robots tag (<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">) that instructs Google not to display a cached version of a web page in search results. The “View Google’s cached version” link normally allows users to see a snapshot of a page as Google last crawled it. The Noarchive tag disables this functionality. This is useful when content is time-sensitive or when businesses don’t want regularly updated content to be visible in an outdated form.

The mechanism is straightforward: Google continues to crawl and index the page normally, but no longer offers a link to the cached version. Users will no longer see a “Cached” link in the search results. However, Noarchive does not remove the page from the index, and it continues to rank. This distinguishes Noarchive from Noindex, which removes the page from the index entirely. Noarchive only affects the display of the cache link, not the indexing or ranking itself.

In practice, Noarchive is used fairly rarely. It can be useful for pages with very frequently updated content (e.g., news, stock data, live event information), where an outdated cached version causes more confusion than help. It can also be useful for pages with sensitive temporary information or older versions of important documents. However, most websites benefit from keeping the cache link, as it leads to additional clicks and Google bots use the cache for rendering optimization.