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You’ve probably seen them before, the urls with googleusercontent.com in them. Probably you wondered what they were, and were a bit suspicious. One place where they show up regularly are your Google Adsense stats, in the list of sites accompanied by this warning:

Webcache Google Usercontent: Your ads have recently appeared on websites you haven't authorized. To avoid lost revenue, make sure to authorize any sites where you display ads by visiting your account settings.

adsense unauthorized sites warning

What is the Google Webcache?

Now, what is that? What to do with those unauthorised sites?

Well, every page that is crawled by the Google spider is cached and serves as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the “Cached” link, you will see
the web page as it looked when Google’s spider indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to see if the page is relevant for your search.

Another one that comes up regularly is translation.googleusercontent.com. This is not coming from cached pages, but, yes, you guessed it right, from pages translated through Google’s translation pages.

Google used to serve these pages straight from an ip-address, but, most probably because of ease-of-maintenance considerations, they now changed this to a domainname: googleusercontent.com.
So, the most important question: can you trust these sites? Yes you can!

Editing or removing your page from the Google Webcache

The second most important question is: can I edit or remove my website or webpage from this webcache google version?

The answer here is pretty simple: yes. And in a few ways even!

  • You can wait for the Googlebot to re-crawl and re-index your webpage. This is the natural flow of things for the Google Webcache, every so often, the Googlebot visites your website and crawls your pages. When it notices that your page has been edited or deleted or moved, it wil adjust their indexes of your webpage, and thus also the Google webcache version of your page 
  • You can request a rescan in the Google Webmaster Tools This will make the Googlebot visit your website again, and recrawl the requested pages, making sure the changed pages are now reflected in the search index, and in the webcache google.
  • You can use Google’s public URL removal tool to request removal of content from your own or someone else’s webpage.
  • If you have a webpage that you explicitly do not want to be cached by the webcache google, add the metatag <meta name=“robots” content=“noarchive”> This will prevent Google from caching your page, while still keeping it indexed.

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