Watch your cache dates!!!!

I think there is a relation between the page cache update and the page rankings. On one of my websites I noticed that without making any changes, the same pages tend to rank higher when the cache is freshly updated after which they fall again a few places and .... back up at the next cache update.

 

hmmm well my sites are all spidered daily but cache is updated at random times by Google even when I update... the cache of unchanged pages sometimes gets updated tho as well

 

You can use the "touch" command on unix/linux boxes to update the timestamp on a file

 

Ironically, i have a site in a different situation. The site is ranking better each week, but shows NO cache. it also shows no related sites, or backlinks (which the site does have)

 

Can you use the touch command without giving write permission to "other" for the particular file you want to "touch"? I keep getting a permission denied warning unless I change the write permissions.

Thanks...

 

Its all depending on how your system is setup, rwhetsto. On my system all files are owned by my user account, and chmodded 644 (U+RW GO+R). The cronjob runs nightly as my user account, and does not have file permission issues. The cronjob is a simple script that calls 'touch (file)' on every file under a specific directory. I also do many other things at the same time to these files which are very specific to my site, so I am unable to post the script -- but anyone with basic UNIX scripting knowledge should be able to write this in 2 minutes or less.

DS

 

McDar,

Can you help me understand the 'specifc code' issue?

My reason is that for link exchanges, the home page of a small site of mine shows no cache when navigating to it and checking cache from the toolbar.

Yet a G search for: cache:68JZx3QrNiMJ:www.audienceresponseplace.com/ displays the cached version.

So, I'm interested in why this might be, but moreso in how I might get G to spit out the cache without a 'special code' query.

Thanks....

/*tom*/

 

Hi Tom,

Yours is a weird case! Indeed your page is cached by Google - BUT Google doesn't seem to know it...

Typically, when you enter a url (that is cached in Google) in Googles search you get this type of response...


BUT
when I searched for your main page this is what came up...


Google doesn't seem to know about it's cache of your page In fact, when I search for www.audiencereponseplace.com Google returns "audiencereponseplace.com"

Also, when I do a search for site:audiencereponseplace.com I get 40 pages returned and when I do a search for site:www.audiencereponseplace.com I get 38 pages returned.

Google has something messed up there.

Caryl

 

That just looks like a recently spidered and not yet completely indexed site to me. And I can find very few external links to this page except from forums and biz-directories.

Except that a whois shows a thumbnail of the page dated "2005-01-26"... and also indicates

and this:

If ever there was a case of a "bad neighborhood", theplanet.com is it.

http://www.bandofgonzos.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1881

 

Thanks Caryl & Minstrel...

I moved this and a number of other small sites to e3servers about 3 months ago. I had no idea that there was some relationship to the Planet.com. Even if I had, it would have meant nothing to me as I've never heard of them before.

Thanks. This explains the issue.

 

Hmm...One question... Does the checksum for a page's PR and the cache checksum match by chance. I am diggin into this right now, but I though you might already know.

Thanks

 

Yup, my PR6's and PR7's get spidered daily. I can have page 1 google results a day after adding them to the site.

 

Yeah, but I have PR3, PR4, and PR5 sites that get spidered daily too...

Yeah right... if you pick a sufficiently obscure search term you can do that without the PR6 and PR7 pages...

 

I've got 1 page, that according to Google, was indexed back in '69, LOL

Guess G dropped 2 many hits of acid at woodstock that year....

 

Well after I updated the server "time stamp" Google was updating the page again, daily...

BUT - today reverted back to an older version of the page!



Google is using the page that was modified on 4/17/2005. The current "metadate" on the page is 5/6/2005.

NOTICE that Apr 28, 2005 14:58:38 GMT was never a "reported" cache date (until today).

MY QUESTION: How old is the information that Google is really rating this page on???

Caryl

PS - I have checked across all of the datacenters and all access the same "reported" cache of the page.

 

No, the two checksums are not the same.

Caryl

 

Wow.
My google cache date was way back in April so I did as you suggested and touched all the files. Recent cache is now May 19th and I've climbed serps for every keyword. Up to #6 and #15 for the main 2 keywords up from 30 and 90+
Thanks for the advice

 

how do dynamicly generated pages fare? do they have a timestamp that reflects the time the php processed? or the time the php file was written?

 

For some reason, Google is showing a cached page of my site from March of last year, even though I get hit everday from the bot. It just started happening lately, why would it all of a sudden show an old version of my page like that?

 

This is the sort of thing I have been seeing in Google in the last few months.

I have seen a cached date reported as ex. yesterday's date, then the next day Google is showing a cache date from three or four weeks ago. It is not just the date, the cached page returned is indeed an old version of the page!!!

This is why I have suggested watching these.

If you noticed Google has "fallen behind" on your cache dates, try as I have previously suggested. Open the source of the page, save and close it, then re-upload to your server.

Caryl

ps - I include a meta tag with the last save date on it so I can verify Google is showing the latest "version" of the page.

<meta name="Date" content="5/24/05">