Preventing Google from Caching PDF Files
In July, I wrote asking for ideas on how to prevent "View as HTML" links from appearing on PDF files. In other words, authors of PDF files don't want them to be cached.
A DigitalPoint Forums member seems to have found the way to do this without implementing robots.txt. After all, he wants his page to be crawled but he doesn't want the HTML to be available.
He shares the following tidbit:
A special case is PDF files that should be indexed, but not cached. There is no way to directly include meta information in a PDF file, but if security is enabled for a PDF file it will be treated as if the noarchive tag was specified. Security settings can be controlled using Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader).
Apparently, therefore, it's possible. More information can be found in this article that allows you to control caching of your pages.
Has anyone had success with this method?
Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.
This post was written on September 11th and scheduled for publication on September 14th.
Like The Story? Vote For It On Yahoo Buzz! Or On Sphinn!
Tamar Weinberg in Google Search Engine at September 14, 2007 9:15 AM
Comments (2)
Comments
Hi Tamar, you might want to take a look at http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/handling-googles-neat-x-robots-tag-sending-rep-header-tags-with-php/ where Sebastian shows how to leverage the x-robots HTTP header tag to apply "noarchive" to PDF files.
Posted by JohnMu at September 14, 2007 10:00