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Understanding the Google cache

Posted by Josh on Thursday, December 28th, 2006.

Google and other search engines cache pages, storing copies of them that they use for indexing. You can think of the cache as a snapshot of a page at a moment in time.

You can examine the cached copy of a particular page by creating a query like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.web1marketing.com

You can look at any page by placing it immediately after “cache:”. You will then see the time and date at which Google stored the cached copy as well as how the page appears to Google.

The purposes of inspecting the cache include the following:

  • If a page is in the cache, then the search engine has been able to find it and has indexed it.
  • You can examine what the search engines see of a particular page to verify that content is visible (and not hidden by CSS, JavaScript, etc.).
  • You can see how recently Google has taken a snapshot of that page and thus get an idea of how likely it is that recent updates have been “noticed.”

Some important caveats about the cache:

  • Just because a page is cached doesn’t mean it’s easy to find or going to rank well.
  • It takes time for some pages to be found and cached. A page that isn’t present may be too new for Google to have found and cached. However, if you know your site is frequently visited by Google and hasn’t been cached in a reasonable period of time (several weeks), make sure your links to that page can be found and followed by search engines. More on this.
  • There is a (considerable) delay between content updates, caching, indexing, and PageRank changes. The date of the cached copy does not mean that the search rankings or PageRank values reflect that version of the content. There is always a lag.
  • Just because you see it in the cache doesn’t mean that the search engines are reading it exactly as you would expect. Google — and other search engines — purposefully are vague about how they actually look at and rank pages so that it’s hard to take advantage of their algorithms. The cache may draw images from your current web server.
  • A page may be found by Google in various ways. Someone else may have linked to it in order for Google to find it. Presence of a cache doesn’t mean that you have a great navigation scheme.

Note that almost all of the above information applies to the other major search engines.

© Web 1 Marketing, Inc.

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Categories: Miscellaneous, SEO, Web Analytics.

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2 Responses to “Understanding the Google cache”

  1. Amy Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 3:53 pm

    If a website page is in your cache does that mean:

    It has been visited?
    How can you tell if it was a pop up type page or if someone actually visited the site?

    Thanks

  2. Josh Says:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 9:45 am

    Hi Amy. There is another cache on your computer that is completely separate from Google’s cache. The one on your computer is basically just the stored copy of a page your have viewed that is often used by your browser to quickly call it back up if you revisit the same page. If a page is in the Google cache, Google has visited the page. That doesn’t *necessarily* mean that the cached version is that which your rankings are based on if you have made recent changes. In other words, they cache the page before they adjust rankings, so there might be some delay between caching and rankings changes.

    I’m not clear on what you’re asking about for pop-up pages.