It appears that many Google cache dates are showing that they are about a month old. This is odd behavior, as typically for most websites that are active, the Google cache date in the search results will only be a few days old. Or, it typically would be updated either the previous day or within the past few days.
For example, the above screen capture is what my site’s home page shows in the Google cache–which is October 20, 2014. About one month ago.
If you look at Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer, it’s about the same time, a month ago:
Then again, let’s look at the Google cache date for Majestic SEO (now Majestic.com):
So, it appears to me that there are certain sites whose Google cache dates appear to be “stuck” around a month ago, and haven’t been updated. The Google cache date for SearchEngineLand.com and Yahoo Shopping is today, so Google is definitely still caching pages. They haven’t stopped caching pages.
How to Check Google Cache Date
The easiest way to check the Google cache date and the cached version of the page is to find the page in the Google search results. Then, click the little “drop down arrow” next to the listing, as shown below:
Once you click on the “cached” link, you’ll be taken to a cached version of the page and you can then check the date at the top of the page.
There definitely isn’t a stoppage of the Google cache, because there are a lot of sites that still have a Google cache date of today. But, those tend to be sites or pages with higher PageRank and are updated more often. However, I updated my site’s home page yesterday and am not seeing an updated Google cache date. Based on my experience, though, the more often you update your page the more often Google will cache it–but that’s typically behavior from the past.
We may be seeing some sort of activity related to the Google cache date because of the fact that we may be seeing an update soon or something related to a Google algorithm update. But at this point, honestly all we can do right now is wait and see–and keep updating your pages.
H/T goes out to AJ Kohn for discovering this.
