For many years Google included a link to the last stored copy of a web page in their index and displayed the link along with other website information on their search results page. They recently removed the “cache” link. Here is how to view the cache for any web page in Google’s index.
What is a cached copy?
That would be a copy of the code and content that Google stores for each web page found on the web. This is also the copy of the page that Google analyzes for ranking purposes. Every time the GoogleBot spider visits a page, it grabs a copy of the most current version of the code for the page. The code includes the content, but not the images. The images that you see are the images stored on your website. Google merely adjusts the link to the images whenever necessary so that the HTML link to your images points to the copies of the images on your site.
Why is Google’s cache important?
The cached copy of a web page can sometimes be important because it includes the date and time when GoogleBot last visited the page.
This can be useful because it tells you how often Google’s spider is paying attention to your web site. When a website is not updated often enough or possibly has been penalized, Google stops visiting a website regularly. We have seen cases when sites left unchanged and stagnant for several years are only visited by GoogleBot once every 3 or 4 months. You cannot blame them for paying less attention to web sites that only rarely or never change.
Most web pages are visited at least once per month. Very active sites that frequently update information may be visited several times per day.
To view the cache for any page, simply use the cache query command to pull the cached copy from Google’s index. Go to any Google search box and enter cache: + the web page URL. Do no use any spaces in the query.
The query for the Top Rank Solutions home page would be:
cache:http://www.topranksolutions.com/
If you do not see any copy of a web page in Google’s cache or if the date on the web page is several months old, that web page or your entire site could be in trouble. This would be an indicator that the time to update your site and its content is past due.
