freejung - 8:45 pm on Apr 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

Google keeps old copies of pages going back months, maybe as long as two years, and the URLs will continue to appear in SERPs for any words currently or previously on those pages

g1smd, yeah, I have seen that sort of thing before, but I wasn't being clear. What I was talking about is the inverse of what you are describing. The page has been changed and new words have been added that were not there before. The cache still shows the old version of the page, but the page shows up for the new words. So it's not that G is showing results based on an older version that is no longer cached. It is showing results for a new version that has not been cached yet.

It is possible that this was going on before as well, and I just never noticed before. My experience has typically been that a new page starts showing up for new words when the new version is cached.

The cached version does say that the words only appear in links to the page.

I just did a major revision of my site, including siginficant changes to nav structure, and... I don't know, it just feels different from when I've done that before. Usually within a day or two the new versions of pages start to show up in the cache, and at the same time they start ranking for new keywords. At the same time, new pages also begin to show up in the cache, and start ranking for new keywords.

Now it just seems very different. Not a single new version has been cached, but if you search for new keywords you can see snippets of the new version of the page. None of the new URLs have been indexed at all. It's like G is sort of holding the entire site in some sort of limbo while it sorts out what I've done to change it. That didn't happen last time I made major changes to a site.