4 replies to this topic

[Jac]

I just completed optimizing a site and was surprised to see it already cached on Yahoo (not google or MSN). When I click on "cached," I see the brand new content and complete optimized page. The title and description on the SERP, however, remains the same. Why would it have crawled and not change this pertinent information? This is probably a stupid question, but any advice would be appreciated!

Sincerely,

Jac

Edited by Jac, 29 June 2007 - 08:56 AM.

[torka]

Is the page in the Yahoo Directory? Could they be pulling the title and description from there? (If it's listed, they will unless you tell them not to with a NOYDIR directive.)

--Torka

[Jac]

Actually, no, which I find puzzling. I just can't figure this one out. Any other thoughts? Has this ever happened to anyone else?

[Randy]

You'll also want to make sure it's not a DMOZ description. It's rare, but I've seen Y! pull those a time or two for some unknown reason.

If I had to hazard a guess it would be that you're probably looking at completely different datacenters Jac. It wouldn't surprise me at all of the caching is handled by a completely different set of servers from the datacenters that handle search and the display of title/snippet. If this is the case it should eventually sort itself out as all of their server farms catch up with your current offering.

If you search for the exact title, in quotes, you can sometimes figure out if they're coming from Y!D or DMOZ.

[Jac]

I think you're right about the datacenters. I know there are tools for looking at multiple Google datacenters at one time. Is there one for yahoo as well? The new title and description were displaying for a while and are gone again (though the cached page is the updated one). I'm not freaking out anymore, though, since you've calmed me with the datacenter explanation and seeing the google datacenters display the different titles assured me I didn't commit a major blunder.

Just curious to see if there is one for yahoo, as I wasn't able to find one. This is probably for the largest site I've ever optimized (a huge database and e-shop) though their links and page rank were initially low. I'd known in theory that it took weeks or months for the engines to crawl an updated site (especially one with such low traffic), but I guess I never knew that it might appear to take a day, but actually still take weeks while the other datacenters caught up. Very interesting. Thanks for your help!!