Cache Date in Google SERPs

Recently the cache dates have stopped updating as frequently.

[stueym]

Hi,

I have checked my log files and my site (PR6) is getting all 20 pages crawled almost every day as I have lots of deep links. This used to be reflected in the cache date show in the SERPS which used to be updated daily.

Recently the cache dates have stopped updating as frequently even though the site is getting crawled.

Has anyone noticed anything similar? Do you think this is anything to worry about?

Stu

[Speedmaster]

I am also noticing the Google cache of our site is not updated. Our update is currently July 14. Before that date, the cache was updated daily. Anybody know why this means?

[DaveAtIFG]

There may be a clue in #3 ("It's true that the summer (northern hemisphere) is when traffic is lower and sometimes it's easier to roll new things into crawling/indexing/scoring.") and #10 ("Like I mentioned before, summer is a good time to work on pulling in new pieces of infrastructure and ways to rank/score pages.") at [webmasterworld.com...]

[sailorjwd]

I finally got a few new cache dates today... that's the first in 10 days.

[JoeHouse]

Regarding Google Cache.

Is the cache the same principle as a googlebot spidering your site? Does google use googlebots to obtain new cache dates? Or are they one in the same?

Does google also crawl your site while they cache your page?

Can someone please explain the difference, that is, if there is a difference between the two.

Thanks

[Dayo_UK]

I am with DaveAtIFG - I very much think something is going on behind the scenes.

Joehouse - Googlebot fetches the pages and then the pages are indexed and cached shortly afterwards (using the data Googlebot has fetched) (Although sometimes page dont make it to the index and Google does not always use the most upto date cache)

[JoeHouse]

when we refer to cache we are talking about the homepage cache right?

[shri]

Ditto on Dave's observation.

Virtually all our sites that are in the daily crawl are showing old dates, new pages have been bouncing in and out of the cache for the last several days.

Nothing to panic about .. will sort itself out.

[g1smd]

There is an effect that I have seen, and been able to verify and faithfully reproduce, at least half a dozen times.

I had a site where the pages were cached every night at almost the same time every night. This had been happening for at least two years.

I then linked to a blatently spammy site to see what would happen. The next night, the cache date failed to update. The night after, the same thing happened again. On the third night the cache dropped back to one from a few days ago, and after another few days it dropped back at least a week or 10 days.

The cache date remained stuck at that old date. About a week later I removed the link, but the cache date remained "stuck".

After about three days the cache date changed, but instead of being the date from "yesterday" it was actually the date from three days ago. Over the next few nights the cache date changed again, but always stayed at a date three days behind the current date.

After nearly a week the cache date reverted back to being "yesterday" and continued to update every day too. This remained for another month or more until I tried the experiment again.

I have tried theis experiment at least 6 times now in the last 8 months and always got the same sort of result.

Linking to the spammy site seemed to very rapidly trigger some sort of change of priority in the caching of the site. Leaving the link in place a little longer then stalled the caching completely. I believe the next stap might have been making the page a supplemental result or it dropping out of the inxdex - but I wasn't going to go that far.

After removing the outbound link, it took at least a week for the caching of the page to recover. The pages that I experimented with are PR5 and PR6 and have been online for about two years.