Sometimes there are certain pages on your site that you don’t want caching by the search engines for whatever reason. Today I’ll discuss a few ways in which you can achieve this without harming your site’s SEO efforts.

Firstly, why might you want to ‘hide’ certain pages from the Google index anyway? The main reason is to avoid duplicated content. Sometimes there will be pages that your visitors will find highly useful, for example a page which lists articles relating to a certain tag. If this page were to be cached it would be likely to contain duplicated content from elsewhere on the site. Other pages that you may not want to be cached would be login pages, restricted areas of your site etc.

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After creating a truly huge site recently, we were faced with the problem of getting all the pages cached as quickly as possible. As many of you will know, Google will cache pages that are the least amount of clicks away from your most important pages (e.g your home page) first. After that though, the search engine is likely to take its time about caching the rest for inclusion in the SERPs.

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By the title of this article you may think I am talking about some sort of time-travel. You’d be wrong. I am of course talking about how using caching in your applications benefits future visitors to your site.

Caching in it’s simplest form is ‘recording’ the state of page after it has been processed by the server so that future requests for the same page or information are served up without having to be processed again.

Caching is especially useful for pages that make database calls or load other libraries / pages into the page in question. By caching these pages, the information can be stored as a static HTML page or similar and served up to future visitors in a fraction of the time it took for the page to be processed by the server initially.

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