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A WebmasterWorld thread has a senior webmaster claiming that in some cases, Microsoft Bing is ignoring the <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> tag. The noarchive tag basically tells the search engine not to display a "cache" result in the search listings.
This webmaster said it some cases Bing is honoring the tag and in other cases Bing is not. He said there is no rhyme or reason to this, "it's inconsistent, and I don't find this to be true across all the websites I've got those meta tags on," he said. Of course, I don't have an example, being the thread is from WebmasterWorld.
But recently, we have seen many complaints about how Microsoft's Bing handles certain webmaster/search protocols. From not honoring NOODP tag, to not effectively using the meta language tag, to other geo problems and crawling too fast, including clicking on search ads, as well as adding pound signs to URLs - Bing has had its recent share of criticism.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
bad1
08/05/2009 02:52 am
<meta name="robots" contentS="noarchive"> - there was a mistake in syntax, the already figured it out.
Barry Schwartz
08/05/2009 10:06 am
Thanks for the update bad1!
dape
08/05/2009 10:27 am
It would be useful if there was a universal list of agreed tags that can be used, at the moment it seems to be that the search engines are lacking synchronized consistency, ie - we will follow if we choose.
No Name
08/05/2009 04:57 pm
Correct me if I'm mistaken but I don't really see the importance of the no archive tag either.
MGA
08/06/2009 04:29 pm
How come they ignore our request for no archiving. There are a lot of pages that i don't want to appear for search results...
George Langley
08/06/2009 07:02 pm
No Name wrote: "Correct me if I'm mistaken but I don't really see the importance of the no archive tag either." The importance can be many fold. For instance, if your page displays constantly-updating info, you don't want someone quoting a cache that is who-knows-how-old. Mistakes and typos are another reason - perhaps you write something that turns out to be wrong, but the SE will continue to display that mistake even if your page has been corrected. And some sensitive (possibly password protected?) info should not be accessible outside of your site (not that you can prevent people from copy/pasting, of course!) And lastly, if you want to drive traffic to your site, especially for advertising dollars, may not be ideal if a user can see the info without actually going to your site.