Google Webmaster tools - Last homepage visit vs crawl rate

Last homepage visit in July 07, 32pgs indexed 1-0 crawled per day

[cmendla]

I've noticed something a little odd in webmaster tools with a couple of my sites. I looked at little more closely at one site and am a bit puzzled.

- The site has 32 pages indexed in google
- it's about 2 years old
- Webmaster tools shows that the last time the homepage was visited was july 12 2007
- Daily Crawl stats in webmaster tools for pages visited by the crawler show 28 max, 10 average, 1 minimum
- no errors indicated
- The site is low traffic now - 7000 visitors +- over the last year. However the trend is upward (now getting 30-40/day vice 1-3 a day a year ago)

What I don't get is that with 32 pages, why is google only reporting that it visited the homepage a couple of months ago but that it is visiting at least 32 pages a month and, if we believe the average, 320 pages a month. Surely the odds would be that it would visit the home page more recently than July.

It would seem that something is out of whack.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this.

Thanks
cg

[mayest]

Same problem here, and even with the same July 12, 2007 date. Is that a coincidence? I've changed my home page several times to see if I could make that date change, but with no luck.

[SEOPTI]

They also report old cache dates with my sites from Aug. and July.
Their caching system is full of bugs.

I did a test with one URL which appeared with cache date from July and removed this URL. After adding it one week later it showed a fresh cache date.

[edited by: SEOPTI at 8:37 pm (utc) on Oct. 14, 2007]

[cmendla]

Is it possible that the "Last crawled" date of the homepage doesn't change if the homepage hasn't changed?

In other words, if I haven't changed the homepage since July 12th is it possible that webmaster tools reports july 12th, even if they visited it later.

cg

[tedster]

With any data storage and retrieval - especially on a massive scale - almost anything is possible, but what you describe is not Google's intention. Even when a 304 not modified is sent by your server, Google's intention is to update the reported cache date.

There are lots of very old cache dates being returned on Google in the past few days. I think it's just a reporting error, and I doubt that the rankings are being calculated on that old data.