Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have an interesting question that I have been struggling with now for weeks and every time I think I understand it....I don't.
I make changes to my site and most changes are simple tweaking of KW on pages for specific products, in links, and off page with link partners. (Lets not even discuss or re-iterate the importance given of those tweaks)
I base a lot of these tweaks on the CACHED pages - times, dates, and actual wording.
Several times lately over the past couple of weeks, I notice my site shift up or down - then usually within 24-48 hours I see a new CACHE for the page and the site immediately shifts again.
I have noticed that the site typically shifts FIRST then, about 48 hours later I see the new CACHE - and then right after the CACHE within almost several 2-4 hours - it shifts again.
So my question is...
Is it possible that the most current search results have absolutely no bearing on what the CACHE is?
Google says it does:
Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the "Cached" link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.
Could G actually be showing the results based NOT on the CACHE date that you see, but a prior one?
There could actually be no correlation between what you see in the SERPS versus the CACHE in spite of the stated policy.
If this was actually part of the ALGO it could certainly work as a red herring.
I think it is and I may actually be optimizing against myself...
Thanks in advance.
ARC
Is it possible that the most current search results have absolutely no bearing on what the CACHE is?
I've also noticed that there often is not a coordination here. Given the size of the data set Google is using, I'm not really surprised, either. The cache servers are here and the relevance data is over yonder, or so I'm assuming.
Frequent tweaks based on the cache date are not something I do any longer, given both the volatility in many of the SERPs and the kind of disconnect that you've noticed. I also feel that frequent tweaks that are not substantive changes in content can hit some kind of threshold and then no matter how sane they seem, they start to hurt rather than help - or so it has seemed to me at times.
The crawl still must come first, obviously, but the visible cache data is not necessarily correlated to the ranking algo.
