12 replies to this topic

[lisety]

Well, a few weeks ago I was congratulating myself that I had achieved position 5 for the great keywords "tropical resorts". The last 3 days I have slipped 1 position a day, and now am at 7. My site is relatively new, probably indexed only a couple of months. I was pretty stable at position 5 for a few weeks. Do you think this is the "sandbox" thing? I just switched hosts this morning.

Another question. Yahoo has no cache of my site, is this significant? I've noticed that there are quite a few sites listed with no cache.

Thanks in advance for any advice.
Lisety

[SearchRank]

It is typical for sites to move up and down in rankings. It could have something to do with the fact that it is new and "settling" in to the index but again, it is typical for SERPs to fluctuate.

[BrianR]

I've also noticed that Google has no cache for some sites aswell - and some of them have been listed for ages.

Why would that be?

BrianR

[BrianR]

So, does anyone who has not escaped to Toronto know the answer to this??

BrianR

[Steve Sardell]

Hi Brian,
In the past, I've had a couple of index pages disappear from the G cache. They always reappeared, sometimes the next day other times a week or so. For these sites it happened after changes were made to the page. Have no idea if it were coincidental or not, but the disappearing-reappearing has always befuddled me. My thoughts have always been either the changes or a host temporarily down when the crawler was out and about, but it is just conjecture.

[BrianR]

Thanks, Steve - I've seen that happen, and it's ok if it's only temporary. I'm talking about a site that has been listed for some time but has never had a cache. Beats me!

BrianR

[Randy]

Now don't shoot me for asking the obvious Brian, because I know you've probably looked at this, but are the pages sending any META tags to keep the engines from caching the pages?

If that's all okay, you might want to take a look in the .htaccess file if the site has one. Or use something like Delorie's header viewer or WebBug to verify nothing funny is going on with the headers at the server level.

It's been ages since I've seen it, and I've never used it myself, but you can actually control caching of an entire site or entire server with a combination of the Apache mod_expires and mod_headers directives. Nobody would do that on purpose likely, however if the host did something like that you'd never know it just by looking at the code on the page.

If it's a temporary thing that just happened, I'd write it off to being a fluke. If it's a continuing issue, as in this case, then there has to be something causing it. The hard part is finding out what the root cause is; once you know that it should be pretty easy to fix!

[lisety]

I'll say that, at least for my site, there should be no reason that I'm aware of for it not to be cached. I've got a cache in google. Last time I checked in yahoo it looked like half the listings on the page where I was listed were not cached.

I know for google not having your site cached might mean that you're still vying for position and they're not quite sure what to do with you yet until you get more links. Is it the same for yahoo? Then if so, you'd think that once a site was cached in google, it would be in yahoo. I think something else is going on with yahoo because one or two of the sites I saw not cached were relatively well known sites. Any thoughts?
Lisety

[BrianR]

The hard part is finding out what the root cause is...

I had a nasty feeling that you might say something like that, Randy!

Anyway, thanks for the advice - I shall have a good look at it at the weekend.

BrianR

[Randy]

Interesting Lisety. No ideas come springing to mind immediately. However one would think there has to be a common cause somewhere.

I love a good riddle ! Let's all keep an eye on it and see if we can figure it out, just for fun.

[lisety]

...and we do like to have fun here
Lisety

[OysterWings]

Or use something like Delorie's header viewer or WebBug to verify nothing funny is going on with the headers at the server level.

I used the Header Review tool at delorie.com, but I don't know how to interpret some of the results. For example what is:

ETag: "2e4434-3f61-40a42adb"

OR

Connection: close

Is there an explanation of these things somewhere or is it knowledge that comes from many sources over time?

[lisety]

I used the same tool and noticed at the top it said "200 OK" so I didn't look any further and figured I was good to go. I'm hoping that's accurate.
Lise