Google's Cache Date - What does it tell us?

[irldonalb]

Hi All,

This might be common knowledge but I haven’t thought it out previously.

I check my Google cache regularly and I'm always interested to see that the data is never more than an hour old. The site is a busy portal that is updated with new content constantly.

I've noticed 2 things. If you search for a long tail phrase that’s never been searched for previously, the site will appear (as quick as an hour after its been live)

However, the rankings for existing phrases won't be influenced by the new data.

It got me thinking. Google must go back to the cached data to conduct analyse on a new never been searched for phrases. New cached content is probably in a temp table so they can check new phrases for it. Do they also do this for commonly searched for phrases after every X searches?

Donal

[tedster]

You are the lucky owner of a frequently spidered site, that's for sure. And many of your queries must be tagged QDF (Query Deserves Freshness). For most sites, the cache does not update nearly this fast and often lags behind ranking changes based on newly spidered changes.

If you search for a long tail phrase that’s never been searched for previously, the site will appear (as quick as an hour after its been live)

However, the rankings for existing phrases won't be influenced by the new data.

I'd say that this 2-index phenomenon you're noticing is related to "minty fresh" indexing. My guess (only a guess) is that for SOME queries - those determined as QDF by Google - the rankings would be influenced by the fresh data. For other query terms, the influence will be slower.