What Is Search Engine Cache?

Date First Published: 25th January 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what search engine cache is in this article.

Search engine cache is a cache of webpages that can be viewed in SERPs. When a page is crawled, it collects the contents of the page in order for it to be indexed and can store a copy of that page at the same time. The cached version shows the page as it was when it was indexed by the web crawler, so the content may have changed since then. Users can view cached versions of websites when the website they are trying to visit is down, cannot be reached, or has been changed. Examples of search engines that allow users to view cached versions of webpages are Google Search, Bing, Yandex Search, and Baidu.

Search engine bots will not just store a cached copy in the SERPs once. It will store a cached copy each time it crawls it. The cached version will then be accessible to users in SERPs. The cached version may be accessible by clicking on the 'Cached' option on the search result.

Blocking Search Engine Cache

Not all websites have search engine cache. The website owner can choose not to make a cached copy available to search engines by adding the noarchive tag to the head of the HTML document. The noarchive tag looks like this:

For more information about the noarchive tag, see this article.

How To Check The Google Cache?

There are two ways of browsing the cache for saved versions of a webpage in the Google search results, including searching Google for a specific website and directly accessing Google’s cache.

After searching for a specific website, you can then click on the three small dots next to a URL in the search results. This will open a small dropdown menu with a button that will take you to the cached version of the page, as shown below.

It is also possible to directly access Google’s cache. This requires you to know the exact URL of the page you are looking for. You will have to insert the following URL into the address bar of your web browser below:

Then, after the colon, you have to insert the URL of the web page you are looking for (e.g. example.com).