Noarchive Tag: When, Why and How to Use It

Meta robot tags are not that innovative, but there are various scenarios where you have to utilize the Meta robot tags. Managing bigger websites can prove to be difficult, and this is where a Meta tag helps us.

That’s why most site owners use Meta robots tags to manipulate how search engines like Google recognize, index, or ignore the webpages of your site altogether. Let’s see what Noarchive tag is and how it can be used on your site.

Introduction of Noarchive Tag

There are several Meta tags that can assist your website in managing the way it gets indexed and crawled on Google. The Noarchive tag manages whether your particular webpage has a cached copy or not. When the website owner creates a webpage, it naturally keeps all options activated.

However, for a well-optimized site, you need to set some limitations for what a webpage can do. For instance, in case you might don’t wish search engines to cache certain pages of your site. To make it happen, you can use the noarchive tag. It will communicate with Google about your request not to cache a particular page.

Many people think that noarchive tags can affect a site’s ranking, but it is not true at all. According to John Miller from Google, there is no major effect on search ranking if you use a noarchive tag on your site. 

How to Make NoArchive Tag?

You can make the noarchive tag by using the below-mentioned coding:

• <Meta name=“Robots” Content= “Noarchive”>

Here’s another way to make it, and Google also recommends this way:

• <Meta Name= “GoogleBot” Content= “Noarchive”>

This first method for creating a noarchive tag is compatible with all search engines. However, the second one can only be used for Googlebot. 

Is it Beneficial to Make Your Webpages Cached by Google?

It could be. For illustration, it allows your site visitors to access your website even there are issues with your server or if the site is temporary down. 

Google also offers the “text-only” type of your webpage that provides a glimpse of how it appears when your site works fine. 

When to Use Noarchive Tag?

When you want to post a time-sensitive content on your site, then you should use the noarchive tag to make sure it doesn’t cache by search engines. In case you don’t want the content to publish for everyone, then you should also put a noarchive tag on the webpage.

By doing so, you can prevent search engines like Bing and Google to completely cache your content or a specific post. These types of content may include:

• Ads that you don’t want to be cached by search engines. 
• A landing page for your PPC ads that you don’t wish to show to everyone.
• Any kind of sensitive document you want to keep for too long on the search engine’s history. 
• Private documents that you are not willing to make public historically. 

In some of these cases, you may have already used other tags such as noindex Meta tag or robot.txt disallow. In case you don’t want to use those tags to block search engines altogether, then use the no archive tags to make sure that your pages are viewable on search engines for a short period. This will help you entirely remove the content of the webpage whenever you want.