Why does Google cache pages?

[dougnez]

Hi...Why does google cache pages? And ..Is there any way to avoid pages shown in I-Frames from being google cached as individual pages??...
Thanks Doug

[Mook25]

Re: Why does Google cache pages?

Hi...Why does google cache pages? And ..Is there any way to avoid pages shown in I-Frames from being google cached as individual pages??...
Thanks Doug

I'm not really sure myself why google caches but i do know that you can't choose which one it caches. It is usually the index page thugh as far as i'm aware.

If there is another page within your site which you would like to exclude then you could maybe set up a robots.txt somewhere and add that page to the list to exclude. If the page is already in the cache you will not be able to remove yourself as If you give it a bit of thought, you'll see that such a possibility would mean that people could remove their competitiors' webwebsites and that wouldn't be a good thing obviously. Unfortunatly it can take awhile to drop out of the cache too.

[Bethers]

Re: Why does Google cache pages?

If Google didn't cache pages, then there wouldn't be a search engine - as it is showing the page it spidered to give the results it does. All se's are doing this. And if you change your page - when it next spiders you - you might move up or down in where you show up in searches based on those changes. But since it doesn't and cannot check every page at the time someone does a search, it has to work from it's cached database.

And, no you can't avoid that problem with iframes - as it is an individual page. Which, if people knew the name to it - they could go directely there, also. Usually the se's don't show it individually - put they also might not read what's on the iframe page when they decide how relevant the original page is to the search.

[dougnez]

Re: Why does Google cache pages?

HI.. In my case.. I prefer that certain I-framed pages are not cached.. So I'm gonna place that metatag Bethers provided to directs robot not to cache.. Yes they usually do cache the front page which is fine with me... Doug