SERPS: Date next to my page disappeared

[sf22]

Hello,

I check my ranking for a certain keyphrase at least 2 times a day. Today morning, I couldn't find that site in the SERPS anymore, so I first tried to find it through a more complex keyphrase where it always appears at rank 1. The page still ranked #1 but the date next to it didn't appear. Furthermore the cache-version is a very old version of the page, which can't be accessed through the internet since two weeks.

Hell, I really don't know what's going on, I had no downtime over the last few days, and the freshbot always visited me at least 1 time/day.

Stephen

[kaled]

This is normal.

New pages seem be folded into the index by a bodge. They may not stick for about a month. Also be aware that for new sites SERPS may be erratic. Stability may take 3 - 4 months.

The date in the SERPS is omitted once the page is more than a few days old. Google use it to advertise that a page is new - they don't want to advertise that their index is old!

Kaled.

[troels nybo nielsen]

I think this "freshness" feature was introduced back in 2002. On top of the "deep" crawl that indexed most of the web once every month or so Google launched a new bot that in some periods crawled quite a few pages more or less daily.

During 2003 those two crawling patterns were to some degree integrated. Many pages almost constantly have "fresh" dates that are 1-3 days old, but sometimes they disappear.