What Is The Noarchive Tag?

Date First Published: 7th November 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what the noarchive tag is in this article.

The noarchive tag is a meta tag used to instruct search engine bots to not cache a specific page. It is located in the head of the HTML document and prevents search engine bots from creating a cached copy of the page in the search results. Caching can be controlled on a page-by-page basis and it only applies to one specific URL. Web crawlers have to crawl pages in order to see the tag. An example of the noarchive tag can be seen below:

Note:

Similar to the noindex tag instruction, in order for the noarchive instruction to be effective, the page must not be blocked by the robots.txt file. If the web crawler is blocked by the robots.txt file or cannot access the page, the crawler won't see the noarchive instruction and an option to view the cached version of the page will still appear in the search results.

Note:

If the page a website owner is setting to noarchive already has the cached option in the search results, it might take some time for the cached option to disappear from the search results as search engine bots will have to recrawl the page to see the noarchive tag.

Why Would Website Owners Use The Noarchive Tag?

Usually, search engine bots create a cached copy of the page that can be accessed in the search results. This is useful if the website is inaccessible or down, but there are reasons why website owners would not want search engine bots to create a cached copy. The types of pages that website owners may not want to be cached are:

• Pages with sensitive information that they don’t want a cached history of.
• Advertising they don’t want search engines to cache.
• Frequently updated pages that are updated much more often than the search engine cache. Users might not find the most up-to-date content of a website.
• Other documents that website owners do not want to be historically public.

Does Adding The Noarchive Tag Affect The Ranking Of Pages?

No, adding the tag has no effect on the ranking of pages in SERPs. It is not possible to get penalised for using the noarchive tag. Google has stated that there is nothing wrong with using this tag and it just removes the ‘cached’ link for the page. The page will be indexed by search engines and can be displayed as a snippet at the top of the search results.

Blocking Specific Bots

Specific bots can be blocked from making a cached copy by adding the name of the bot. In the example below, only Googlebot is prevented from caching the specified page.