No Page Has Fresher Cache Date Than June 4th

[rhwd2003]

Hey guys, any help is appreciated.

Have a pretty big site that has hundreds of thousands of links and we add new content every couple hours and never had a problem getting crawled or cached in over 8 years. Always have a cache date just a few hours old and new content is cached easily within 12-24 hours. We recently have had some big keywords we ranked for drop when we had stuck the #1 positions for years and after further looking we have no page on our site that has a newer cache date then June 4th. The only pages that have a cache date earlier then June 4th are our blog which is fed through Google News. But the blog takes up 5% of our site pages so not worried about the blog. We naturally gain tons of links everyday from high quality content that gets shared virally and through all areas such as twitter, facebook...etc.

So with all of our site not being cached anytime after June 4th what should we start to look at? Nothing has been changed on the site or server. And is that why our big term rankings have dropped as well? They still rank top 10 just 7-10th when we ranked #1 for years.

Thanks!

[tedster]

The secondary signals we are used to seeing from Google have certainly shifted and I expect them to shift some more. As long as traffic stays healthy, I'm not sweating the side issues right now.

I think there's still a lot of "broken pipes" on Google's back end reporting, probably due to changes Caffeine introduced, and I expect to see those plumbing problems shake out pretty well over the coming weeks.

None of that addresses the situation where you also lost rankings - and especially traffic, since rankings now flit around like butterflies. I'd say that the jury is still out on this, but it seems to be, usually, a side effect of the Mayday update - and that's not 100% understood yet in the webmaster community.

What we can see is that, rightly or wrongly, the new algorithm has selected those pages as not being the best in quality for a search user. Google is taking aim at content farms, micro-sites and all manner of not-so-valuable content that used to rank well (and those sites still do in some cases). So the question I'd ask is what is it about these pages that looks off to the algorithm, even if the pages are high quality.

Ongoing discussions in the Google Updates and SERP Changes thread [webmasterworld.com] may be of value to you.

[dvduval]

I've had some problems with my homepage getting indexed as well. The rest of my site is fine, but the index is June 6th. I'm seeing some signals that google is a little confused about my url structure, though they certainly werent' in the past.

In my case, I have something like
root_url/script/index.php
It's a normal 302 redirect from the root url that has worked fine for years. Just hoping they will patch up the bug (if that is indeed the issue). It seems likely that it is.