Recently, I clicked on the "Cache" of some of my website pages listed on Yahoo! They looked corrupted (unintelligible in parts). I wrote to Yahoo! but, at best, I was told to add a metatag so that Yahoo! will not cache my pages. I hesitate, because this means that neither will any other search engines cache my pages. What are the pros and cons to proceed with the metatag (get search engine listings which include a page link to the most recently crawled page without a page link to an older cached/archived version of the page)? Also, what metatag do you recommend, where does it go, and what will it achieve?
Search engines only store a copy of the HTML file used to harvest keywords from. They do not store images, stylesheets, or javascripts along with cached pages. Why? Because keyword-harvesting robots understand TEXT, not pretty designs.
You can sometimes compensate for this by using full URLs wherever possible. ("http://mysite.com/foo" rather than "/foo") When users click on a cached link, the full URLs used will be able to tell user's browsers where to download the appropriate rich content.
JWooden271: That link was helpful for the additional topics on it. Otherwise, I think that I will ignore Yahoo! caches and hope that most people can use their heads and click on the most current page option available with each cache page. Thank you for explaining the mentality of the cache pages.
