How to prevent Google [any search engine] from archiving your content

We all know that search engines archive a version of any web page and a cached version of a web page is available with the typical search results. But what if you don’t want your page archived (not to be confused with the indexed URLs)? This is my preference since I often update and tweak posts, even the old posts. I don’t want the archived version to remain even after I decide to delete a post. The solution is to add a “noarchive” meta tag. Add the following text into the header of your web site:

The result is that if you do a search on my blog pages for example, there is no cached version for any of the pages. And provided you have a backup routine in place, you shouldn’t rely on the archive for a backup. Google talks about this under “removal of a cached page”.