Back Again - but old cache

[rcdc96]

Hi everyone

Before the update I had a #3 position on one of my keywords.
Part way through the update it moved down to nowhere.
Today its showing on all 9 datacentres at #2 BUT the cache is at least a month if not 2 months out of date.

Anyone else notice anything similar?

Does this mean that its position is necessarily based on this cache? or could it be based on the current page - or even the page that the last update was based on?

Any ideas appreciated.

[AthlonInside]

If you site appear no where before, refer to

[webmasterworld.com...] &
[webmasterworld.com...]

[rcdc96]

Thanks AthlonInside

I have been avidly reading those forums

Forgive me if I explained things badly but my point was not about the going and comming back but the fact that now that its back it is very old cache showing.

Further to this can we be sure that the current ranking is based on the latest crawl info when it shows this old cache?

It seems difficult to know what is the case and I wondered if any webmasters here had ideas they would care to share on this subject

[AthlonInside]

I always insist that the index of this update is the NEW index crawled by the latest deepbot last month. The OLD index (2 months ago) is only used for calculating PRs and backlinks. On-page factors are calculated from the new index.

[WebMistress]

Old cache of my site, too. Even though freshbot has been by several times this week.

[IITian]

Old cache of my site, too. Even though freshbot has been by several times this week.

Similar experience here. Showed the latest with freshtag of May 23 for a while and now is back to older cache.

[g1smd]

For one site that went live just after the middle of March, was freshed quite a lot, and slipped permanently into the index around 2003-05-11, the cache shows data collected on or around 2003-05-11 (or recollected later). Freshbot has been back many times since then, but no fresh tags have been displayed for the last couple of weeks, except for 23 May 2003 displayed yesterday. No changes were made in site contents since 2003-05-07 so I can't tell if it has been re-cached or not since 2003-05-11 which was the last time the cache changed. Definitely still newer version in the cache.

However, another site (also went live just after mid march) was crawled and freshed at the beginning of April, and has had the same cache contents ever since. The site has had a lot of changes but Google indexes, lists, and caches it the way it was on or about 2003-04-08. It refuses to take note of any changes made since then.

[edited by: g1smd at 9:37 pm (utc) on May 25, 2003]

[WebMistress]

This is interesting. Had freshbot tags of May 23rd, too. Then suddenly old cache. Tends to suggest old data again, which may explain a lot of wackiness the last 2 days.

[rcdc96]

I keep on thinking that there is no programming reason why the results need to be related to the cache page that it shows.

Obviously I can't say for certain and maybe some of the more experienced webmasters can shed some light on this but I was under the impression that the results are based on a database that is extracted from the pages and the the cache page link is added almost as an afterthought since it doesn't refer directly to this page when doing its calculations.

When I do site updates it seems common for the cache page to update nicely to the fresh one but the position never seems to vary except on one of these updates

[steveb]

Cache page means virtually nothing, despite a lot of folks fixation on it. The only time it comes into play is with freshbot results where specific words appear on one version of the page but are entirely absent from another version. These pages have always been ranked as any freshbot page, meaning they would appear but would seldom get a great rank. In the past, if you had a page about widgets, and tweaked the widget focused text on the page, it meant nothing. The deepcrawl, backlinks, anchor text, etc. determined ranking.