Eliminating Your Website From Google’s Cache

September 16, 2006 – 1:37 pm

Google keeps a cache of every web page you make. The cache copy is basically a copy of your content, as it appeared on a certain day in time. This “snapshot” can remain active for quite some time, perhaps even indefinitely. For many websites this might not be a big issue. But for other websites, you may not want to allow Google to have this copy.

Possible reasons for having Google exclude your web pages from their cache:

1) Potential legal reasons – storing information you may want changed later can be a big problem. You probably can’t sue Google either, as the cache has been found to be fair use.
2) You receive no financial or implied benefit from keeping the pages in there.
3) Phantom pages live on, long after being changed or removed

So, if you decide to exclude Google from cacheing your website, what measure can you take?

It’s quite easy, actually. Add the following code between your “head” tags at the top of your HTML documents.

The change won’t be instant. It make take several weeks for Google to find your new instructions and honor them. I’ve began experimenting with this on several websites, and will report my results when I have some. If there’s no negative consequences from removing the first few, I’ll take all my sites out. I really dislike the idea of Google’s “permanent record”.

For background information on the Google Cache:

The legal issues are at least worth glancing over, especially for newbie webmasters.

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