NOARCHIVE in robots.txt (no more CACHED search results)
I was looking for a way to make Google (or any search engine) NOT display the link to the “cached” version in the search results. And this is what you have to add to your robots.txt to prevent crawlers and spiders from creating a cache of your webpages:
User-agent: * Noarchive: /
It’s the word “Noarchive” that prevents Google (and Yahoo, Bing etc) from caching a copy of your website. Below you see other words that might be useful:
robots.txt noarchive nosnippet nocache notranslate
And, yes, “Nosnippet” suppresses the snippet itself (= the text below the link) AND the zoom preview. Unfortunately Google doesn’t use something like “Nopreview”. So if you want suppress snippetting, translating or caching then the robots.txt would look like this:
User-agent: * Noarchive: / Nosnippet: / Notranslate: /
Disallow caching by Alexa and WayBackMachine
You might also add …
User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
… to your robots.txt since I think that someone who dislikes caching search engines might also dislike TheWayback machine (archive.org)
Nice is there a way to do this per a single page?
Of course: “Noarchive: /path/to/the/directory” OR “Noarchive: /path/to/the.file”
This is awesome, I have been looking for this for several clients that allow resumes uploaded and they didn’t have a robots.txt file or any meta tags. They complained that their users resumes were being indexed. LOL. Thank you so much for this.
recently i did seo for my client and i am having issue of old urls still cached, i have already updated robots.txt file for my client’s site with your suggestion to remove old urls from google index and i will let you know how did it go.
Thanks,
Rushikesh