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Last week's tip discussed how Google crawls sites, and caches the web pages. This week's tip will explain more about Google's caching.
When you search on Google, it returns a list of related sites. The results are returned in the following format:
If you look closely, beneath each listing is the word "Cached". This "Cached" page is the snapshot that Google took the last time it spidered the web site. If you click on the word, "Cached", you will see Google's copy of this web page (meaning not necessarily the current web page, but the web page as it was when Google took a snapshot of it).
If you searched Google on a certain keyword or keyword phrase, Google's cached page will show this keyword or keyword phrase highlighted every where it shows up on the page.
If you update your web site, Google will still have the older snapshot of your web page in its cache until it spiders your site again, and updates it's cached snapshot. Sometimes, it takes 2 months for Google to update its cache.
If Google spiders and caches your web page today, and tomorrow you make modifications, users finding your web site in Google will see the old cached snapshot, not the new page. However, if a user does a search on Google, and finds your site, when they click on the URL, they will still get the updated, "live" site. It is only when they click on the 'cached' site that they will see these older snapshots.
It's up to the person who manages the web site to keep the pages up to date. This could be the web designer, the web master, or anyone who is tasked w/ maintaining the pages. However, you have no control over how often Google updates its cache, so if you delete a page from your web site, Google still has that page in its cache. If people search for a certain keyword, and your cached page is displayed within the results, when people try to go to that page, they will get a 'page not found' error.
Another problem to worry about is if you move information around on your web site. For example, let's say you are selling blue widgets and red widgets on your web site. You end up w/ too many widgets on one page, so you divide them up into a page for red widgets and a page for blue widgets. If your old widget page is still cached in Google (containing both red widgets and blue widgets), people searching on Google for, say, a red widget, will see the cached page appear in Google's listing of results. When the user clicks through to the live link, they might end up on the blue widgets page, and get discouraged that they did not find any red widgets on the page.
Next, Optimizing versus Pay-Per-Click explained.....
Hope this helps! Feel free to email Lesley if you run into any problems.
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