Anyone who’s SEO-savvy knows that a big key to increasing your exposure in search engines is to get the Web crawlers to visit your site, and to do it often. When visited, spiders create a site cache to help them archive what’s on the page. This cache, or snapshot, of a Web page stores the information exactly as it appeared on the date the site was crawled.
Once cached and included in the index, the spiders return periodically to see what – if anything – has changed. The old versus new comparison is a quick and easy way for the search engines to update their archives and adjust their rankings accordingly.
The more frequently you update your site, the more often the spiders will visit and note changes that will help your site rank higher in the search engines. Search engines use the content stored in the website cache to determine if the page is a good match for the query in question; so unless you’ve been crawled recently, your changes won’t be noted.
What does this mean for your website? Your cached Web pages are the secret to your online success! Any updates you make to your site are meaningless from an SEO perspective until the site is archived. Since there’s no set schedule that the spiders “crawl the Web,” getting the engines to take note of website updates is often a bit of a waiting game. Depending on the frequency your site is updated, your site may be crawled as often as every day or two, but it can sometimes take a week or longer.
Why does Google cache pages? Basically, it delivers results by comparing the content on your site with that of every other site it can find. By caching your content into its database, Google is then able to deliver up your website for thousands of different keyword queries. Since Google has to know what is on each site before it can deliver results to a customer, it periodically caches Web pages in order to make sure the end user gets the right information. Periodic caching also ensures that new content on the site is reflected in the search engine index. One of the other great things about cached information is that it allows the search engine to judge your site on its own merits, as opposed to using information compiled in directories.
When was the last time your site was crawled? Visiting a cached version of your site is easy; just click on the cached button that appears along with your page’s search engine listings. To learn more, give us a call at 1-877-Rank-321.
