Question about http cache-control headers

Discussion in 'Site & Server Administration' started by Austin Real Estate, Jul 29, 2009.

  1. #1
    I'm working on reputation management for a friend of mine. I got a site that previously had a negative post on my friend's business to remove that post. We requested that the page be removed from the site and from Google Cache.

    I searched for the keyword that we were worried about and got the google result of the cached negative page from about 9 days ago. I clicked the link and the browser requested the page in question with this:

    GET /<anonymized>/<anonymized>.html HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.<anonymized>.com
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.0.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
    Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
    Keep-Alive: 300
    Connection: keep-alive
    Referer: http://www.google.com/search?q=<anonymized>
    Cookie:<anonymized>

    I got the following response:
    HTTP/1.1 302 Found
    Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:14:21 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
    X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
    Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
    Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
    Pragma: no-cache
    Location: http://www.<anonymized>.com
    Content-Length: 0
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html

    Right now, from a practical standpoint, I don't see the old negative page since it has been 302 redirected to the root of the site, so that is good.

    My question is what will happen in the long term for the page and google's cache of that page. I read about the cache-control and pragma params, but couldn't find anywhere that specifically said that google's spiders will see this and obey it for the cache and how long it would take.

    If it will solve our problem with the caching of the negative page, any ideas on how long it will take for google to eliminate the entry from its cache?

    Thanks a ton!
     
    Austin Real Estate, Jul 29, 2009 IP