... I hope! Every so often I find something that stumps me for an explanation even after researching it. Can someone please explain the purpose of "cached" results in Google and what importance they have in the general process of SEO? Also, I understand that www. mysite.com/index.html should 301 redirect to www. mysite.com but should the same be done with www. mysite.com/index.php ? Thanks in advance.
your site is "cached" means that it's accessible and already in G's database. Simply dont care about it
Thanks; I've noticed some sites for certain keywords dont have the "cached" link along side their result. If the page is being returned it must be in google's database but why would it not be cached?
I am pretty sure if you 301 index.php you would have a redundancy error. but yes you can 301 redirect if you switch the location of a page to not lose link juice and potential traffic
it indicates that your page content has been "cached" means indexed into google search database and yes you can redirect in that way also
and if a "cache:www .mysite.com" search does not return anything yet searching for "www .mysite.com" does, what can that mean?
if you 301 redirect an index.php it mshould work - for me it did once. But it is not neccerearry to do so because google knows its the same page.
Google has already said that they don't differentiate between index.php, index.html and just the domain or / path if content is same. You can still use 301 redirects and/or canonical URLs to ensure there is no confusion. 301 redirects are also useful when you are looking at page stats in analytics.
Thanks; I already knew about the 301 for canonical URL's and looking at the page stats in analytics; I use this technique to tie up vanity URL's for tracking but was not aware of the non-differentiation between index.php and index.html. Can I ask where this was stated? If someone can shed some light on my "cache" query, that would be great!
It is because of pragma=nocache directive in the head section. Some web sites e.g. newspapers do not want their pages cached as they make their archives available only to paid subscribers. They still want to be found, of course.
Thanks for the guidance but I've rechecked my head section and there is nothing regarding caching I could have added/left in by mistake. Is this the ONLY reason pages wont be cached?
The way to prevent the Cached link from showing in Google's SERPS is to include a <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> in the <head> of your page. This also prevents the Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/ from archiving your pages. Some sites do this for legal reasons to prevent their current content from coming back to "haunt" them later during litigation. Though Google now does a pretty good job of figuring out that http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html are both the same page, other search engines are NOT very good at doing so. I highly recommended that you select a canonical URL for all folders containing default documents like index.html, index.php, default.asp, etc. and 301 redirect all non-canonical URLs to the canonical. This way Google AND the other search engines know which is the canonical and they will: 1) give credit for all inbound links to the non-canonical URLs to the canonical URL eliminating duplicate content and split page rank/link juice issues that will hamper your ability to rank and 2) remove the non-canonical URLs from their indexes (at least at Google they remove the old URLs... Yahoo! doesn't seem to eliminate the old URLs... wierd but what do you expect? it's Yahoo!)
Thank-you! Noarchive was in the head section. I've now removed it from my template to see if it that has an affect.
suppose if i want to divert all the traffic from ../index.aspx to www. site .com so what is the best way to achieve that ? 301 re-direct or what ?
When your site is cached in Google, it can only mean that your site has been crawled by spiders. Cache is the recorded version of your site in the eye of the spiders that crawled it.
One more thing: Apparently I was short of sleep yesterday and I first told you pragma nocache directive. It is an instruction to the visiting browser, not to search engines. Just to clarify and not to mislead anyone.