Website home page not cached in Google

[n00b1]

I have recently made some changes to the words used in my website navigation, just to make things shorter and snappier. I understand that changing such things can cause some shake-ups on Google, especially if you remove/add a keyword associated with your website. In this case I removed two instances of a related keyword from the navigation.

I have noticed that if I search for my website using my main keyword, which is also the website name (it's an EMD) my website sometimes disappears from the search results entirely. Other times it appears, lower down than it did before. If it does appear then strangely it seems there is no cache for the page (my home page). If you search for the website without a space or get to it by other means in search then there is a cached copy. What's going on here?

[aakk9999]

From what you have described, this seems similar to a problem discussed May this year on this thread:

Why Google is Not showing Cache copy of my website?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4576096.htm [webmasterworld.com]

How long ago have you changed the home page?
Have you tried "Fetch as Googlebot" in WMT and then "Submit to index"?

[n00b1]

Thanks for the reply aakk9999.

The homepage was changed on October 9th. It used to be cached as normal for its main keyword but now it isn't cached for its main keyword but is for others. I have used Fetch as Googlebot and submitted it to index a few times over the past couple of weeks. The cached copies are all relatively recent except for with the main keyword where there isn't a cached copy.

[lucy24]

Have you repeated the search, using the identical terms but using different browsers and maybe different IPs? You also need to exclude a major red herring: Google is so vast that it uses multiple data centers. So sometimes the same search will lead to different results purely because you're talking to a different computer. This is most unnerving with a brand-new page; the page itself can seem to disappear from the index if you land on a data center that hasn't got the latest version yet.