Using Cache Date Info to Your SEO Advantage
January 18, 2009 by jp · Leave a Comment
So, you have a shot at securing a link on a good-looking high-PR page. That sounds like a sure winner, doesn’t it?
Well, before you fork over the cash (or do whatever quid quo pro might be necessary to get it), there’s something you need to check. Go to Google, find the page you’re looking for in the SERPs and take a look at the date upon which that page was last cached–or, in the case of some scenarios, if it’s been cached at all. PixelHead breaks it down like this:
Check for cache with the site:url and with out the site:url. I believe that using the site:url returns pages that have been visited by the Google Spider that does deep searches, which are done with less frequency. If paying for links, I want to make sure that the links are cached by regular spiders as well as deep searching spiders for more Google juice for the link.
What you find might surprise you. Some pages and sites get visits from the Googlebot a few times every day. Others, even ones with impressive PageRank, see the spiders less often than you see your great aunt Edna who lives on the other side of the country.
You can find out which category a site falls into by looking at that cache date. That information is going to give you a good idea of how important Google really thinks the page is. If the search engines don’t feel a site’s worth checking out more than once in a blue moon, you should have reservations about its ability to help your site as a backlink source. As one forum commenter noted:
Since you need “quality” backlinks, you can start out by checking the cache date in Google. In the search box enter: “cache:www.thedomainname”. If the cache date is more than a month old, or worse yet, unchached, you might not want to waste the effort.
It actually goes a little deeper than that. Cache date isn’t just a good way of seeing how valuable potential link locations are. It’s also a good way to assess whether your site (or those of your competitors) are really as impressive in Google’s eyes as you might think.
