I've noticed an increasing amount of "hits" on my website that are being generated from cached results. This strikes me as a bad thing if I'm trying to generate ad revenue, am I right? I've noticed on most of the cached results my ads don't appear (Google errors most of the time, or server not found the other times). As a matter of fact, my #1 referrer is MSN's caches, which is why I'm a bit alarmed by this. If I am right, can I stop Google (or any search engine for that matter) from caching my webpages?
That doesn't help me at all, all it covers is the basics of robots.txt usage, which I already know. It doesn't mention caching at all.
You are right. robots.txt does not help here. To avoid caching by search engines, use: <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> Code (markup): I am not sure this is a good idea though. Maybe you could change your pages to ensure that ads are visible in the cached versions of the major search engines. It should work with AdSense, but some affiliate programs don't pay if the referrer is not in one of your sites. Jean-Luc
But that's what I'm referring to, my AS ads most of the time either show a "server not found" error or some custom Google error (I can't read the whole thing since it's cut off inside the ad's frame... looks like a "Not found" error). I'll look into your suggestion, Jean-Luc, thanks.
One of my competitors uses "noarchive" and has over 10 million indexed pages. Having cache'd pages available was useful during the Jagger/BigDaddy/Supplemental Hell updates and allowed me to identify problems but other than that I don't see any value in it. I've asked quite a few people about it and no one has said it would cause ranking or indexing problems and I'm considering adding it to all my sites (old and new). I'd be interested in hearing other experiences if there are any. . . -jay