Posted 3 years ago #
How to prevent Google and Archive.org (and other such sites, if they exist) from caching pages?
I have a blog, but some time in the future I might want to remove it for this reason or that. In that case I am obviously not going to want it to be safely cached away at various places on the internet.
How can I achieve this?
At the root of your site (and I mean the *root*, not any subdirectories), create a robots.txt file.
In that file, put the following:
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
This prevents archive.org from archiving your site.
To prevent Google from keeping a cache of your site (but still allow them to index it), add this to your theme's header.php (near all the other meta tags):
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE">
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOARCHIVE">
To prevent many others from doing the same, add these as well:
<meta http-equiv="CACHE-CONTROL" content="NO-CACHE">
<meta http-equiv="PRAGMA" content="NO-CACHE">
There is no real way to prevent *all* sites from keeping archives of your site. But these methods above will keep almost all well-behaved systems from doing so.
Posted 3 years ago #
That was fast. Thank you. Should I add </meta> to make the tags XML compliant?
Whoops. Yeah, you can change the > at the end of each to a /> to make it XML compliant.
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