Linking to cached files

Hi list,

In my article "User friendly 404 error messages reconsidered",
www.smackthemouse.com/error404, I link to 11 cached error messages. 

Now, it is no problem to save somebody's web files to your own pc, but it is
not without potential problems to upload cached versions of another
website's web files to the Internet.

Cached files are nice for documentation (they will stay the same) if you
review a website, et cetera, and Google has been doing it for a long time
for other purposes.

I see many usability and accessibility problems in linking to your own
cached version of another website's files.
Have do we prevent the cached files from being indexed and how do we notify
the user in order not to confuse them? 

Here is what I have done:

1) My link text says "cached" and I give the date.
2) At the end of the source code of the cached file, I have added a comment
with "Saved from", URL and date.
3) In the cached file I have added "[cached]" to the end of the page title.
4) In the cached file I have added <meta name="robots"
content="noindex,nofollow"/>.
5) In robots.txt I have added a "Disallow" for the file.

Would you consider the above best practice or can it be done better?

Best regards,

Jesper Tverskov
www.smackthemouse.com

Received on Monday, 24 July 2006 08:51:56 UTC