Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
1. All else being equal, your ranking "score" (for lack of a better word) will not change until your google cache version changes. Meaning, lets say all sites are ranked based on some score between 1 and 100 (I know they are not... but for example purposes) If, based on your last cache, your "score" is 90, that score will not change until another cache. Therefore, your serp position will not change based on your own page's factors, but can change only based on changes to other pages that are listed in the same results (or change in algo). The site below you can get a new cache and score 91 and move ahead of you (and you then move down), but it is on account of the change in score for their page rather than yours.
2. Even though you may be looking at a new "last retrieved" date when you click on the "cache" link... it doesn't mean that the version you are looking at has yet been pushed to the data center you are using to view results. On a brand new cache (meaning about a day old), the new cache version does not take effect on your data center's results until you see the date showing in the search results. I think I verified this today when I did a search today using terms where the cache link was linking to a "last retrieved" version with yesterday's date. (Jan 4). My serp didn't change based on this new version until the Jan 4 date showed up in the result listings, then it immediately changed by about 15 positions, while still showing the same "last retrieved" date through the cache link (I was searching every minute)
Any basis to dispute these conclusions, or can I file them away as present "fact"?
Even though you may be looking at a new "last retrieved" date when you click on the "cache" link... it doesn't mean that the version you are looking at has yet been pushed to the data center you are using to view results.
That's an interesting observation, and I've seen the same thing. It would come from the natural latency in a system as large as Google is -- one of the issues of scale. It is tempting to think of Google as one big application, but when a system gets THIS big and this distributed, the parallel breaks down and we need to look closer.
Thanks for the detailed information.
Where does the snippet come from? It doesn't come directly from the cache!
I assume the score would be calculated for each phrase or word in your example.
However how're you gonna go about incoming links with anchor text?
If a phrase is present in the title, description and body of the page, adding a link more than the competition will make it more relevant. But when? Will Google check the target for relevancy again?
If you link to a page with a keyphrase in the anchor text,
And the target page already has this phrase in its title, description and body,
Perhaps it never had it in incoming links before,
The page with the link is cached,
Yet the target page is not...
I wonder what happens to the score then.
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And now some additional "facts" about cache.
A fresh cache of a page with new links doesn't mean that the "votes" had been cast. In my experience, it took about four to twelve days for the links ( a few thematic links inside an article ) to be picked up and vote on their targets. It did show some consistency, but was a lot slower than I expected.
I knew when the votes had been cast because the pages that the article linked to came out of supplementals when the links kicked in, without them being refreshed in the index! Same level pages stayed supplemental, but those that had been referred from "above" came out.
So cache date doesn't mean that the links on the page have been counted for, no matter how few of them. They've been indexed, but are yet to be calculated into the ranking of the target pages.
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And as I said, the target pages' caches weren't refreshed when they came out of supplementals. The cache dates always stayed the same. So these supplemental pages didn't even had to be cached again to come out.
[edited by: Miamacs at 11:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2007]
A fresh cache of a page with new links doesn't mean that the "votes" had been cast. In my experience, it took about four to twelve days for the links ( a few thematic links inside an article ) to be picked up and vote on their targets. It did show some consistency, but was a lot slower than I expected.
I agree. And I believe it's more like 14-28 days, kind of a sandbox.
We have picked up a few sweet homepage links with a keyword towards a website that was not optimized specifically for that particular keyword. Google crawled them the net day, but it seemed to have no affect on our position for the keyword until about a month later - 10+ spots up.
As far as the cached pages go - It seems logical, however, it also could be the following: With every fresh cache of your page, the number of inbound links are also "fresh".
If so, this is incredibly valuable info! (I'm probably coming late to the Google cache party!).
