Our pages cached on 8 Aug 2005 - Why?

[vacationcity]

Hello,

Does anybody know why Google is showing almost the 80% of my pages with content cached on Aug 8, 2005?
The snippets of my website are too old in those pages and looks like is using the meta title & meta description that we used to have about the same date.

This is the message in the cached page: As retrieved on 18 Aug 2005 10:18:44 GMT.

What could be the reason for that?

[tedster]

That's the same date that several other site owners have reported seeing in the past few days. Why Google seems to continually revert to such old cache data is a very good question. Wish I knew.

Normally in business, you would think it indicates that more current data became corrupted or unusable somehow. But really, with all their redundancy, I can't believe that's the case with Google.

[texasville]

According to google, they have fixed the supplemental problem prior to june 2005...from there on..they are still working. Our local expert on this problem is g1smd..maybe he will pop in and give you a better synopsis.

[g1smd]

Google have cleared out all Supplemental Results prior to 2005 June, and did this just a few weeks ago. Those pages were previously dated all the way back to 2004 January and many represented pages that had gone 404 or where the whole domain had expired. They also appeared where the page had previously been edited and the Supplemental Result represented the old content that was no longer available, while the same page would appear as a normal result when you searched for the current content. All of those old results were cleared out several weeks ago (but several people report that some of those older pages (older than 2005 June that is) have reappeared in recent days).

At the same time as the clear out a few weeks ago, they created new Supplemental Results for any page that has gone 404 or domain expired since 2005 June. Additionally, for any page that has been edited since 2005 June, the page appears as a normal result when you search for current content, and as a Supplemental Result when you search for any words that were in the old content but which are NOT on the current version of the page. Google has already said that the Supplemental data will continue to be refreshed throughout the Summer, so there may be many changes ahead yet.

[vacationcity]

Thanks you for your help guys!

[walkman]

when I had supps, they were from August 2005 too, even though I know Google had newer versions downloaded. If it went supplemental, the august version was diaplyed.

[godbless]

This fix that google is doing is probably the cause of the drop in SERPs that some website owner are reporting. Is just because google is not showing the correct url (if is not updated).
I mean if you have a url1 for the keyword kw1 and this page has cached content from Aug 2005, google is showing the more related( and update) url of your website (url2).

That means you will not be able to be in google positions because google is not showing your correct URL.

To me that means we need to continue working and waiting.

[edited by: godbless at 2:17 pm (utc) on June 9, 2006]

[pageoneresults]

If Google had a "machine crisis" which they publicly stated they did. Wouldn't the behavior we are seeing now be an indicator that they are recovering from whatever crisis it was? Based on what they publicly stated, it was a storage issue.

I would think that they are now in the process of rebuilding the data. In that process, they've got to recalculate the data they have which goes back who knows how far and then work their way forward from there. Based on the topics here at WebmasterWorld and other communities, it sure sounds like they had to go back a few steps with the Big Daddy update to take a step forward.

[texasville]

I just realized that being in supplemental means that page is not in the serps in any way right now. I just search on my pages using factors that should have returned those pages, and they did not.
Such as "loading-widgets.htm" and specific sentences such as "the way widgets are formed for meeting specifications" and zip..nada..nothing..no results. So what is Google's purpose of retaining these urls at all. It has effectively deindexed these pages.

[g1smd]

A Supplemental result is a copy of the last version seen online where a page has gone 404 or where the domain has expired.

For a page that is still online, the Supplemental Result is based on the content of the previous version of the page. You will see old content in the snippet - content that is no longer on the real page and no longer in the Google cache. The same URL is returned as a normal result if you search for current page content, and you will see that content in both the snippet and in the cache.

[godbless]

I don’t think that this was a space problem in google. The only thing possible to me was that they found a bug in bigdaddy so they load a backup and now they are restoring the data. They probably were trying to get rid of the spam but something happen and they delete some good websites so that was the reason of load the old data. I think they now have fixed the problem and they now are just picking up new information. But this takes time to but updated in all the data centers x all the websites indexed.