Wrong Meta Description Cached - is this normal?

[Whitey]

When using the site:tool to check our new site's caching I noticed that it was incorrect. Every page is recording duplicate meta descriptions from the navigation tool bar ( a brief error on our part ) , which has since been corrected and subsequently cached within 4-5 days after it was incorrectly applied.

I don't know what is happening - but if I look at the HTML of the page the meta description is fine and has been since before the most recent caching. Maybe Google takes a copy of the page, before it actually produces the cache - so the copy it has was before we made the correction.

What's the story on this? Does anyone know?

[tedster]

I've been working on a meta-description clean-up for one site this month. The revised urls are definitely being spidered and cached quicker than the snippets are being updated. Snippet creation is a separate technical team at Google and the processing is apparently on a different schedule.

For example, I did a batch of changes on Dec 19. The Google cache was updated on Dec 24 for most of these urls. But still today, the old snippet is still showing (just the top menu labels).

Given that the snippet team and the ranking algo team are performaing different functions on different schedules, I'm pretty certain it's just a waiting game.