There are many SEOs complaining that the cache date shown by Google is very outdated. Heck the date shown for this site is April 2nd, which is a 10 days ago. But Google’s John Mueller is telling SEO’s not to worry about it.
Here is a screen shot of the cache for my home page:
But like I said, Google is still indexing our content here, still ranking it in search and still sending us traffic to our new stories.
Many sites are impacted by this date bug, but again, I doubt it has any impact on their indexing or ranking. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter “The date on the cached page doesn’t really mean much.” He told SEOs to ignore it, it is not indicative or crawl rates and doesn’t mean quality or not. The date is usually indicative of the last crawl date but clearly here, there is a bug.
Google’s cache date had bugs in the past, so this is not new. I would not be concerned.
Here are some of the complaints:
Same site that experienced the de-indexing issue is seeing no caching since end of March despite re-crawl requests.
— Rick Power (@rickpower) April 11, 2019
Not sure how no one is talking about this, but Google has completely stopped caching pages after March 31, 2019. All new domains have the “cache error” and no cache exists.
Don’t believe me? Check https://t.co/Cymj1dwZ0U cache date. @rustybrick
— SEOwner (@tehseowner) April 11, 2019
I’m seeing this with our site – new pages aren’t cached at all, everything else is dated 31 March
— Catherine Newman (@cathy867) April 11, 2019
The date on the cached page doesn’t really mean much.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 10, 2019
Again, I wouldn’t worry about this too much.
Forum discussion at Twitter.