noarchive directive: what it blocks and whether to keep it

What it means

A page carries a noarchive directive — in the HTML <meta name="robots"> tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. It tells search engines not to store or show a cached copy of the page. It does not affect indexation, crawling, snippets or link equity.

Why it matters

The practical impact is narrow and, on Google, now minimal: Google retired the cached-page feature in early 2024, so the directive has no user-facing effect there. Bing still maintains cached copies, so noarchive prevents Bing from showing them. Note it does not affect the Internet Archive, which honors its own directives (ia_archiver in robots.txt), not X-Robots-Tag. Most often noarchive appears as a vestige of older SEO practice left in a template long after cached links mattered.

How to fix it

1. Confirm whether the directive is intentional — in most cases no action is required, as it does not harm SEO.
2. If vestigial, remove the noarchive token from the robots meta tag (e.g. index, follow, noarchive → index, follow).
3. If set via an HTTP header (Nginx add_header, Apache Header set) or an SEO plugin, remove or narrow that rule.
4. Allow normal recrawl; on Bing, cached copies become available again within the standard crawl cycle.

Example

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<!-- drop noarchive unless you specifically need to suppress cached copies -->

noarchive blocks cached copies. Google retired the public cached-link feature in 2024, so its impact is now minimal — just confirm the directive is intentional.

When it's not a problem

noarchive is reasonable for time-sensitive content (event, auction or price pages), frequently-updated live data (dashboards, tickers), or compliance cases where only the current authoritative version should be accessible. Treat the finding as a review prompt, not a mandatory removal.

How Crawlinx detects it

We read the robots directives for noarchive. Since Google removed cached links in 2024 its effect is small, so we surface it only to confirm it's deliberate, not a leftover.

How common is it?

298 audited sites in our corpus currently show this issue. The breakdowns below show which platforms, gatekeepers, verticals and countries are most exposed.