Understanding caching dates and Google update

I am not clear about when a page gets into index

[nyehouse]

I have a site that showed up as #3 for the keyword "blue widgets" in a very competitive category. All the other top 10 pages showed cached dates of Jan 4, which changed to Jan 6th and now Jan 9th. My site only showed the word 'cached' with no date and had an old page from late December in the cache. All the servers were the same for many days and then this morning, my site drops down to #13 and has the date Jan 9th and shows the new page from Jan 9th. This was the second month I was in the index, and first month that all my links in showed up.

My question is: Is it because I am a new site that my page was not updated as during the dance as often as the others, or is there some other reason why my site did not showed the cached date. Is there something I have to do to get google to come back more often during the dance?

Also, if I want to switch back to the old page that ranked better, will this take effect now, or do I have to wait until next month. The forums had suggested that the dance was over on Jan 5th or 6th, but results are still changing. Is it only the PR that is affected during the dance or all the algos.

Lots of questions, but I am forever learning.

[jamesyap]

I also notice some change in ranking today, I think they tweak their algorithm again.

Freshbot come more often than last time and it is normal for it to visit some sites today and other sites tommorow. Different from the deep crawl bot, fresh bot usually crawl only your root page. If you are lukcy, sometime it will also crawl for pages link from your root page.