Hello, Recently the number of unique visitors bring by Google organic search dropped. Out of the blue. The number of indexed pages started to grow. I compared the Google cache for several of my pages with one of my competitors (a bigger one). The cache for my pages is 4-5 days old, while the cache for my competitors pages are updated daily. First I tried to explain the age of 4-5 days for the cache using the nature of the pages. They are product pages which don't change too often. But I checked for several days my competitor's pages and they don't change either. Does anybody know why the cache for my pages is renewed only once on several days and not daily? Is this affecting my rankings?
I don't think it would affect your rankings (how often your site's cache is updated), but I could be wrong. Do you have a sitemap submitted to Google? You can change the weight + update frequency through the sitemap, this may help Google crawl it more often but perhaps not either.
if your competitor is higher in rankings then that is probably the reason. sites with higher rankings get cached more frequent
Thanks for sharing such useful discussion here as I analyze that indexing made affect on the ranking of a web site.
google automatically determines the interval for cache update. i dont think we could do anything on that.
Google will follow links to your site. If it finds that it is updated quite frequently it will set shorter intervals for indexing. This will affect how often it caches a site. Sites that don't rank high and updated frequently may have caches up to 30 days old.
The cache rate of a page does not affect rankings. Authority, backlinks, and on site optimization are main components of getting rankings. You will get crawled faster if you continue to put up new content at a faster rate.
Indexed pages increase does not mean a better ranking. Still a good sign for not being heavily penalized by still having pages indexed. You may check out main keyword you were ranked to see if it's still ranked or not.