Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], nick279 :)

I'm also seeing strangely old caches of pretty much all pages, but I haven't had a chance to compare this to spidering activity yet. It seems to be a global problem of some kind anyway. It also seems to be concurrent with the cache for 'fresh' content being unavailable across the board.

It definitley seems to be the 15th [very few on 16th] - if anyone has any caches after that date please post?

The entire thing seems to be in a mess at the moment!

A few weeks ago I had to hard code every URL on a specific site to example-example.com because Google had made duplicate pages using exampleexample.com, even though that site has never, ever used the exampleexample.com name, it having pointed at example-example.com for 10+ years.

I can find cache dates of this site for between 6-9th July STILL with exampleexample.com.

Yeah, I know, plenty of people claim to have done their work yet but never have. Is this AI at work? A bot pretending it has done work when, in fact, it has not?

Even for the aggressively-spidered sites I work with, the newest cache I get is July 18th (although the actual SERP is more recent). As yet, I don't see anything remarkable in crawling patterns, but I haven't take a detailed look.

Even for the aggressively-spidered sites I work with, the newest cache I get is July 18th (although the actual SERP is more recent)

Yea, that's the most recent I can find as well (and the actual SERP is about 15 hours old at the moment)

I also have this weird situation with a client site where every page on the site has a cache date of between July 10 and July 15, *except* for the home page, which hasn't been cached since June 9, for some reason. Really bizarre; I can't figure it out.

I can get Google to pull newer cache dates by searching for text on pages that I know appeared prior to the 'default' cache date. Certainly, the index used for search results is different from the cached display, so I suspect a problem with the caching process somewhere along the lines.

Maybe they've ran out of room :)

*** *except* for the home page, which hasn't been cached since June 9, for some reason ***

Is the root index page indexed under a different URL to the URL that you are looking at the cache date for?

That's often seen when the www vs. non-www problem, or the "/" vs. index.html problem is present.

Nope, I had just fixed all that when I took over working on the site, around mid-May. The client had pretty much no presence in Google whatsoever, and he'd changed the name of his business anyway, so we started over from scratch with the old content and a new domain. All the pages went in immediately, and he started ranking immediately - still is, on his internal pages, and the home page for a few searches. But I made some text, description and title changes on that page on June 15, and they haven't been indexed yet - the page's cache says June 9. The other pages are all pretty much up to date.

I usually check a page cache to see if Google spidered it and indexed/ranked it. I think maybe even though the cache isn't completely up to date, the ranking pretty much still is. It's a cache lag. (Publishers with AdSense are used to stats lags.)

Google may be running out of storage space again and obviously the least critical storage is the cache. With no study to back this up, my guess is 99% of Google users don't use the cache unless and until a site/page goes down/is missing.

It's a huge resource burden that may not be financially justified.

p/g

All of my sites have old cache dates (July 14, 15) even though WMT shows cached hours ago.....Something is definitely broke.

I'm starting to see some fresher caches today. The freshest is today's date (7/22).

I see this too Atomic, caching delay appears to have been fixed and is in the process of propagation.

Some of the major .coms [homepages] have now been cached 21st/22nd so looking a little more like

Major .co.uks still not cached though

There was definitley about one weeks' worth of behind the scenes updating when homepages weren't being cached

Yes I see this as well....cache dates on all of my sites are as of todays date...July 22. That was odd, 7-10 days of old cache...I wonder if this is the reason why sites were flip flopping for the last week or so?

[edited by: MLHmptn at 1:16 am (utc) on July 23, 2008]

I have always seen cache dates get stuck for several days or more, about once per month.

Haven't been keeping an eye on that this month, but it seems (from comments here) that this time it was a little longer.

Funny, now suddenly since the cache dates are up to date I am noticing SERP's that are finally staying put. No more flip flop going on like I was noticing for the last two weeks. What are you noticing now g1?

g1, from your previous experience what was the result of a particularly longer cache time - anything significantly different from the norm e.g. algo update?

Way back, like in 2003 or something, it was often signal that an update was about to occur.

In more recent times, I guess the processing power is being used for some other purpose, spidering given a lower priority for a short while.

I've written stuff about this a year or so back, but I don't remember the details now. I've learned not to stress about day-to-day fluctuations too much. If I see something that appears to be going wrong, I check for obvious technical problems with the site, then wait a week or so and see if Google reverts - they always do.

It's just odd to me how it only seemed to be the home pages, internal pages were being cached fine.

Pages with the most PR perhaps?

google search data, cached dates and cached content often are out of sync.
It is oblivious that google is pulling out multiple data sources for user varing requests.

Our homepage and several of our competitors homepages are still showing cache dates of the 13th, webmaster tools hasnt updated data for our site since then either. Wierd stuff..

Let's take this discussion into a new thread, one that holds the possible explanation:

Google has updated the Cache's appearance [webmasterworld.com]