Noarchive Example: The Robots Meta Directive
I keep no record of my adventures whatsoever, which is why you must take my word for every one of them.
The short answer
- What it is
- Noarchive is a robots rule that asks search engines not to offer a stored copy of a page. It does not stop the page from being indexed.
- Why it matters
- It once hid the cached link in results, and that feature is now gone from Google. The rule still matters on other engines and is often misread as a block on indexing.
- How a crawler should report it
- A crawler should record noarchive in the page's robots directives field and keep the page indexable. It should raise no error, because the rule alone does not remove a page from search.
- Live examples
/lab/noarchive/(positive)
What the no-cached-copy rule still does today
Noarchive is a robots rule that says a search engine should not show a stored copy of a page. The tag is <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">, and the header form is X-Robots-Tag: noarchive. For years it hid the "Cached" link in Google results. Sites with paid content or fast-changing prices used it so that old copies could not be read.
Google removed its cached links in 2024, so the rule no longer has that job there. Other engines can still read it. Bing has said it uses the rule, along with its own nocache value, to shape how content appears in its chat answers. Support and meaning differ by engine, so read each one's current docs. The rule is often left in place on old templates, where it does no harm.
Browsers ignore this rule, and their own cache is a separate matter. That is set by headers like Cache-Control. Search engines can still crawl, index, and rank a page with noarchive. They also keep copies for internal use. The rule does not reach other parties, and web archive projects have their own policies. If you need content kept private, use a login and not a robots rule.
To detect it, read the meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag header, and list the values you find. Do not treat the rule as a fault, and do not count the page as non-indexable. To decide what to do, ask if you have a clear reason for it. If the page has no privacy or licensing need, you can remove the rule to keep your templates simple. If you want the page out of search, use noindex instead.