Several cached versions of a URL available at the same time

[tedster]

I guess I sort of knew this was the case all along, but it just blasted me. One of my friends runs a small e-commerce site and she ran a big sale for ten days in mid-January. It ended Jan 17.

The problem is, she gave the sale a catchy and memorable name. Now some customers are still finding the cached pages that offer the discount, but only if they search on that unique sale name. The cached page says "as it appeared on January 17".

All other query terms show a different cached page - one that says "as it appeared on February 4".

[tedster]

Back when there was one supplemental index, I knew that each URL was indexed as a URL plus a date, and sometimes old versions of the content would surface for a certain query term - along with a "Supplemental Result" tag. but I never fully registered that those old versions also have their own cached page.

I told my friend about the meta noarchive tag, and you can bet that's she's going to use it from now on. She didn't even understand how they were finding the sale offers - and she was having a bear of a time explaining why the shopping cart wasn't discounting orders any more.

[goodroi]

I am not sure if this is so much a Google tip as it is a shopping tip. I find many e-commerce sites will honor expired sale offers if you can find it in Google's cache. It is a good reminder about how Google sees the internet and how their system operates.

[g1smd]

I never fully registered that those old versions also have their own cached page.

Oh yes! Not only that, but snippets are stored separately from cached pages and one or other might not match up with the original query when the content has changed.