Google Cache Question

I'm stumped on this one....

[PFOnline]

What does that mean if one night, I check the google cache of my site, and its the most updated version of my site and I'm happy, then the next morning I wake up and check the cache again, and its now the cache of a way older date, like the way my site looked quite a long time ago?

Thanks!

[jdMorgan]

PFOnline,

What does that mean

It means that everything is normal... :)

The very current cached page you saw is called "fresh" and is updated every day, every three days, once a month, etc., seemingly depending on your page rank. If the "fresh" cached copy is not updated "re-freshed" before it expires, then Google drops back to the last deep-crawl copy it has of your page.

According to a post in another thread today or last night, Google cleared out all "fresh" cached pages at that time, and since only some of them will be "re-freshed", others will revert to the copy cached the last time the site was deep-crawled.

There are different Googlebot IP addresses that crawl sites. Some are for index maintenance and deep-crawling, and others are used to "fresh" cached pages. If you know the IP addresses or domain names of the spiders, you can tell them apart in your server log files. Related post [webmasterworld.com].

The mysteries of Google...

I probably mangled the terminology here - I just flat don't worry much about "freshes" and monthly updates because it is known to cause ulcers - but you can do a WebmasterWorld site search on "fresh" and turn up a lot of threads to read more.

Jim

[PFOnline]

Thanks Jim! That cleared everything up. Was always wondering about that, now i know. :o)

Thanks