Cached more than once...

Different searches show different cache for same page

[g1smd]

(Heh, 600 posts on WW, and only about the 4th or 5th thread I have actually started myself)

I had a page online for several years and two months ago changed the content to something completely different. The page ranks well for the new topic, and the Google cache shows a recent version of the page.

However, the page still ranks well for the old topic, and the Google cache then shows the old content of that page as well. That really surprised me.

I have rechecked this several times over the last few days, so this isn't some browser cache, ISP cache, or temporary datacentre swapping thing.

Can anyone explain this?

I haven't seen this mentioned before; and wonder if anyone here takes this into account when seeing how they are doing in the rankings.

[dmjw01]

Yep, same has happened to me. About 6 weeks ago I split one page into several separate pages because it was getting a bit too big. This also allowed me to give each separate page more specific title text, which I hoped would perform better in Google. But frustratingly, Google still returns the old page for some search phrases, whereas for very similar phrases it returns one of the new smaller pages.

[g1smd]

This isn't quite the same, this is a page that used to be about foo; but is now about bar; searching for bar finds this page in the SERPs with a displayed title of bar and that new page content in the Google cache.

Searching for the old subject of foo returns the same page, but Google also has the old title of foo in the SERPs, and the Google cache shows the old page content as well.

[vincevincevince]

am guessing it's update madness?