Rogue Glass

Since my site is dynamic, I don't want search engines caching it. By added this meta tag <meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />, my site is no longer cached. By doing this, will I be given an SEO penalty?

How dynamic is your site exactly? Are we talking dynamic like Twitter which gets new content every second or like a blog that gets updated multiple times a day? What is the nature of the content you are publishing?

SquareRobot makes a good point, and how much changes?

However, the dynamic content on your site is Javascript based.

Google CAN read javascript - just most of the time it chooses to discard it as it's an easy way to hide spammy text.

If your site's content changes by the second, Google will recognise that and crawl it every hour or so.

I don't really see any reason to stop Google from indexing ARCHIVEing a site - Google will learn how often your site is updated and reflecct that.

More so, now they are trying to master "real-time search".

Back to the actual question:

The answer is that if most of your site is generated with Javascript/AJAX, you should switch to a server side language such as PHP. Google finds it hard crawling sites like that and although G-Bot probably won't ppenalise you as such, it will know that your site is mostly made up from Javascript and proobably not favour your site.

After reading a previous post by mXc I understand that most of your site is made up from JQuery.

This might seem like a good idea, as it's a great way to generate content on the fly. However, generating INNER HTML is one thing, but actually generating your fundimental page framework by jQuery or AJAX is quite another.

The HEADING (H1, H2 Etc.) tags should never contain inner html.

This is because Google is looking for some consistency. By designing your site to be inline with w3c standards, this ensures that the consistency is there.

You will notice that the pages at the top of Google are usually well laid out sites with little or no client-side generated content.

(usually, not all the time)

The heading tag discussion is continued here:

http://www.seotactics.org/on-page-search-e...g-tags-t50.html

My site, HorseGalleria.com, is dynamic in that the homepage will show random listings, the last 5 viewed listings and dynamic content based on the which user is logged on. As far as a search engine is concern, it probably makes little difference. The primary reason for having a "noarchive" meta tag is for the actual listings. Once they expire, I don't want them stored by search engines. Since there doesn't seem to be an SEO penalty, I'll leave if for now.

This did get me thinking about my sitemap. I should modify the change frequency for my homepage from "never" to "daily". My access log does show Google and MSN reading my sitemap daily, so homepage changes should be picked up right away.