The date now appear in the cached page

Very useful to know

[Allergic]

In the first line of the cached page Google now indicate when included-it.

This is G o o g l e's cache of example.com as retrieved on 27 Jul 2004 10:51:14 GMT

[edited by: vitaplease at 6:12 am (utc) on July 30, 2004]
[edit reason] examplified [/edit]

[vitaplease]

Very helpful Allergic, the time stamp "as retrieved on 27 Jul 2004 18:02:01 GMT" part is new to me.

[DerekH]

And having the time in GMT is very interesting - does that apply outside the UK too?

Nice to see that almost without exception Google decides to tiptoe round my sites at dead of night - fortunately the Bot is fleet of foot, because it never wakes me up....

DerekH

[steveb]

Very nice improvement.

(I see GMT in California.)

[HarryM]

I noticed this for the first time yesterday, but it must have begun earlier or been implemented retrospectively. Many pages have a cached date of 26 July but I have found one with a cached date of 17 July. There could be others, but I have only been looking at recently changed pages to see if Google had reindexed them. The site is hosted in the UK.

A really helpful feature. Let's hope it's permanent.

[HarryM]

Re my last post. Some of the pages with a cache date of 27 July also had the same fresh date. But some with the same cache date had no fresh date. So it would appear that the cache date is applied irrespective whether the page has been fetched by Freshbot or the standard bot.

[added] Also found an old page with a cache date of 25 February, so definitely retrospective.[/added]

[Allergic]

Hope Yahoo! will soon do the same.

[GoogleGuy]

That was just added in the last few days, I believe. Hope you like it; it definitely should help webmasters and site owners know when Googlebot dropped by. :)

If you see a crawl date from more than a month ago, you're probably checking out a site that handles If-Modified-Since well. You can probably ask Daniel or Matt from Google for more info about it if you see them at SES-San Jose next week.

[IITian]

It helps. About three months ago I used similar feature from Gigablast to help me.

[doc_z]

I like it. However, it seems that time stamp is only shown for English (hl=en) while there is no date for German, French, Italian, Spanish ...

[webnewton]

retrieved on 27 Jul 2004

Intresting Indeed.

[Leosghost]

always used my own time/date stamp in "html comments" ..every time a page is touched .....surely thats about as basic in SEO research as it gets .....thought everyone did it!...any of you guys pray for rain?

[HarryM]

always used my own time/date stamp in "html comments"

I don't go as far as that (maybe I should), but I have a html comment tag with a last-modified date in my templates and php includes, so I can tell from the source if a cached version is up to date.

If you see a crawl date from more than a month ago, you're probably checking out a site that handles If-Modified-Since well.

Googleguy,

Yes, 'probably' but not necessarily. Googlebot grabs about 70% of my pages every week, but there are always some that can go for months without being requested - such as the one with the 25 Feb date I quoted. That had gone through three or more updates since that date.

Currently there is no way of discovering how many similar pages there are in the index without checking every cache. What would be really helpful would be a 'last retrieved' date included in serps as standard, similar to the fresh date one sees now.

[Leosghost]

I seem to remember that altavista used to do this ..anyone remember altavista?

[Allergic]

>I seem to remember that altavista used to do this ..anyone remember altavista?

Also Comet Search while he was using Google results. Since summer 2003 that was over.