Well, G and all others for that matter. If the cached page showing in G for a particular site page is from before changes were made (e.g. before some new outbound links were added), does that mean it doesn't know about the new OBL's, or is it possible that it has noticed them, adjusted its search results accordingly but just not yet updated its cache?
It is possible that it knows about them but hasn't updated the cache. I've had pages that I know have been spidered and for some reason the cache wasn't updated. You could run a search and see whether G knows about the link: site: domainname.com +anchor text If it comes back with that url then G know about the link. If it doesn't then G doesn't.
cool, thanks - nice idea, seems like it doesn't know about the changes yet, fine by me - better than it knowing about the changes and deciding they are gonna have 0 effect
That will tell you if Google knows the page exists but it won't tell you what outgoing links the page contains... But yes, Google may know about your page before re-caching it. Look to see if there is a date next to the listing of that page using the site: query.