A question about different Google's caches for the same page?

Is this normal?

[pvdm]

Hi,

When I visit my homepage, and I look at it's cache (via Google's toolbar), I see an 'old' version of the page.

When I go to Google's homepage and search a keyword present on that homepage, my homepage is ranked nr. 5 on the SERP. But when I look at Google's cache on the SERP, the date mentioned is '18 sep 2002', and presents the latest version.

Why is this? Two different caches for the same page? Could it be that cached version 1 is on www1 and cached version 2 is on www2?

Any other explanation?

And is it always the latest version which counts in the SERPS?

[Markus]

When you see the old version by looking at the cache via the Toolbar, this is most likely a data center issue. The latest version may have not made it to one or more of Google's data centers.

Google always has two cached versions in its index when the page is crawled on a daily basis. We have the actual date on our main site. When I search for mycompany september, I see our yesterday's page in the SERP, when I search for mycompany august, the SERP reflects the site's version from last months regular deep crawl.

If a search term occurs on the latest version of the page, it seems that always this version appears in the SERP. If the search term does not occur on the latest version, the old version appears. Maybe a new way of optimizing for Google? ;)