I see a few webmasters have chosen to block Google from having the pages of their web sites added to the Google cache. Some people just don’t like their stuff being stored on another server. They use the following tag in the HEAD section of their pages to remove their pages:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

I used to think that doing this would be good for my site, but I have since reversed my opinion on that. The Google cache has saved me a few times. Here’s why I think it’s valuable to keep your site available in the Google cache.

Rescue lost articles

I lost many articles to my site one time. I didn’t have a backup of these articles and didn’t want to retype them. Luckily the articles were still in the Google cache when I searched for them. I was able to copy the text from the article and paste the it back into my site.

Backup for when the site goes down

Like any web host, my host has downtime. So when the site is offline, nobody can get to the site. However, people can still see my pages if they use the cache instead. It’s better to have those few hits on my site through the cache than none at all while the site is down.

It shows you what Google sees

Somebody hacked my site a few months ago. They had managed to exclude Google IP addresses from accessing my site. It left my site to where if Google spidered my page, all it saw was an error message stating “You have been blocked!”. When I looked at the pages normally, everything loaded just fine. I don’t know how I would’ve been able to figure this problem out without the being able to search for my site and see what Google was actually spidering.