What does GoogleBot meta tag do for you blog?
Search Engine Optimization, Technology June 6th, 2007I was messing around the meta tag to optimize my blog and hope to get a better search results or page ranking. I have decided to remove the cache from Google by adding the noarchive to the GoogleBot meta tag.
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”index,follow, noarchive” />
I have few reasons by doing that.
- I found people were checking out the Google cache of my blog. The cache was showing my old blog with old black template. In other words, my visitor is viewing my out-date content. That is no good. I want my visitor to vist my site for newer and fresh content.
- Googel does seem to craw my site more frequently if I turn the noarchive off. In the Google Webmaster tools, it indicates that my site was visited on June 4, but it says June 5 in the search result. With archive turns on, the result pages seem to be older than what is craawled in the Webmaster tools.
So I changed my meta tag to use noarchive. Now on Google search result page, I don’t see cache link at all. Since I changed the setting, I don’t see people checking out my site through the Google cache. I do see people are translating my page into German, Spanish and Chinese. I just don’t know if they can understand me after translate my Chinglish. (English + Chinese)
Now I had one problem which is my fault. I start thinking how GoogleBot cache can help me to recover what the damage I did to my blog. I was reviewing Windows Live Writer and BlogDesk for my offline blogging writer software. I accidentally deleted few of my blog entries from the FireFox plug-in “ScribeFire“. So I screwed! I went to google and did a search and found my old entries with the old template. So I copy them and paste back to my blog as new entries.
What a nightmare. What if I don’t have cache on Google? What if I can’t get my blog entries back? People will like to my site with missing post. It will definitely hurt my blog the big time. Now, I will remember to backup my post. Why is it good idea to user offline blog writer? It does save a copy of the blog and images on my local disk. I can repost it, if I accidentlally delete them on the web site.
Anyway, I don’t know what will cost me if I disable the GoogleBot archive feature. I assume it won’t hurt my page ranking or SERP, if I have a good quality content.
Any idea?
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2 Responses to “What does GoogleBot meta tag do for you blog?”
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June 11th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Missing post are not really an issue unless you have been link building for those pages, then loosing your time stinks.
My experience is that when blogging google will show my blog index page for a post a few days ago, well the post is off my index page when the visitor shows up. Google cache lets them see the page google is referencing in the result and the story they were searching about.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Well. That doesn’t seem to be my case. I only see less than 10% of my visitors are viewing my page through cache and they left after viewing the cache. Only 2% of those people actually visit my blog after viewing the cache. By disabling the cache, all those 10% traffic come through without any doubt. I got more traffic and be able to provide more updated content. And people DO search my post through my search form. That’s great.
I did see people coming through Google with search keywords, but my pages have been missing or on page N, because they are out-of-date or deleted.
There are few possibilities that your page may be missing.
1. You update the post and change the date.
2. You update the post with modified title
3. You change the tag or categories.
4. You import them from Blogger.com or other sources.
WordPress will automatically change your slug and cause your page out-of-sync to your original index. So Google won’t be able to find it and put it under supplemental results.
Like my other post, I have almost 50% pages fall under Google’s hell. I am trying to recover those as well.
Thank you for your information.