Google cached links not present on some fluctuating websites

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Over the last week I have been going in and out of the first page for my main keyphrase.

Each day it goes from page 1 to page 2-3 and it spends about 12 hours a day each. This is only for 2 different search phrases which I wrongfully stuffed into my meta keywords/descriptions in an attempt to gain a higher ranking but I have un-done this.

Anyway, When I show on the first page, the "cached" link under my site is missing. When I'm on the 2-3'rd pages the cached link is present.

The weird thing is, there are 2 other websites that are going up and down from page 1 to page 2-3 as well and their cached link is also missing when they appear on the first page.

I did some searched and noticed some sites on other searches are also missing the cached link.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

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Just another interesting observation I found.

When you change the google query url from: [google.com...]

to: [google.com...]

(replaced "search" with "ie")

It will show you the "bad" rankings. In other words, it will show you ranked on the 2-3rd page.

If you do a search for widgets...yes Im actually talking about the word widgets for real this time. You will see the 12th result is www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/top50/

but if you replace "search" with "ie" in the search string, you will see the apple site is ranked #82

This is pretty interesting.

[tedster]

The second search (with 'ie') is the special utility Google built form mobile search, such as IE on a Pocket PC.

I'm pretty sure that search taps a different data center. In fact, all the yo-yo up-and-down that you see might well be coming from different data centers. You can best check that using something like the ShowIP add-on for Firefox.

The other factor you noticed, the presence or absence of a cached link, that's also a curiosity that might be realted to different Google IP addresses.

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Tedster,

It's not a case of the results coming from different datacenters. nearly 60% of my traffic comes from this one keyword. When i am on page 1, my statcounter keyword referrers are flooded with this keyword. But since this morning...none have come to my site from this keyword, which proves its throughout all datacenters.

the absense of a cached link is weird...but all the sites which I notice that have this have been jumping around in the serps for the keyword they rank for in which does not have the cache link