Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Web Visitors And Revised Web Content (no Cache)?

Posted by soneill on 5/12/2009 at 5:53 PM ET 500 Points
Not sure that SEO/SEM is the best category here but I reckon SEO gurus ought to be savvy enough to address...

I recently joined a new company and they have a home-grown java-based, database-driven CMS which I'm already in the process of replacing.

In the interim, my challenge is this:

We are making some important content changes to existing pages (keeping the same page names) and posting the updated content, but many of our team members must clear their cache or force a refresh of the page using CTRL-R.

The concern here is, of course CUSTOMERS and PROSPECTS visiting the page getting stale and/or confusion content.

The story I have from the technical admin for the web infrastructure is that this is a known problem in general and that there isn't anything that can be done because while meta tags can be set to force "no cache", modern browsers ignore this and happily cache as they like.

Can anyone confirm or deny the story here? Is there anything that can be done to web content to force a refresh to avoid users looking at stale content until/unless their browser cache is cleared or they refresh?

This has visibility at the highest levels here so it's pretty critical. I've done some preliminary research online which has not provided the answers I seek, so now I'm reaching out to my network (including the marketingprofs experts)
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Tracey on 5/12/2009 at 7:50 PM Member
    You can specify stuff to the cache directives to make the browser not cache things.

    But, you don't want to do that for the whole page, because that will make the server get more load. But you can do it for certain pieces of the page. You can put expiration dates so that the browser reloads things after a certain time
    (like if 2 days have gone by, reload the images).
  • Posted by excellira on 5/12/2009 at 9:40 PM Accepted
    Mark Nottingham has an excellent article on Cache Control. The entire page is useful but this section https://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/#CONTROL applies specifically to your question.

    -Greg
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 5/13/2009 at 8:51 AM Member
    Also: https://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/87091
  • Posted by soneill on 5/13/2009 at 10:00 AM Author
    Thanks for the quick feedback. Much appreciated.
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