Cache

A snapshot of a website taken by a search engine spider. This snapshot can be viewable by the search engine users, depending on the cache implementation of the search engine. Many of the main search engines now adhere to the nocache robots directive allowing webmasters keep their content safe, sort of. I make a distinction between 2 sorts of no cache webmasters.I still don't see the point of the no cache directive and am somewhat annoyed by it while searching, many times the search results do not match what I see when I reach the site, content has changed or is removed. I then go back and read the content in the cache, very handy.

Ok back to the 2 types of webmasters using the no cache directive.

1 We have the webmasters that do not want you to read the content, but want you to find it in the major search engines. These webmasters seem to want it both ways, on one side they want us to come in though the search engines but they do not want us to view the content without "paying" for it. Webmasterworld is a very annoying example of this no cache abuse. I hit this site many times in my quest for web development information. My opinion is if you do not want me to read it do not let the search engines read it eighter.

2 On the other hand we have the webmasters that want you to be on their site while you are watching the content and not in the search engine cache, this is the "good" and not abusive way to use the no cache meta robots directive. I am still not very fond of it and hope the implementation will be removed.

The no cache directive will not be removed though, because of legal reasons. Google as an example has already been sewd by many publishers for having their pages in the cache. The strange thing is al these publishers need to do is ad the no cache directive to the meta tags of their pages....