Why is the cached date and versions of my pages so far out of date?

• Why is Google showing a 2+ months old cache date for our website?

  We are regularly publishing unique content and following all rules and guidelines. So it's frustrating that Google is showing old cache dates and page versions even though it's apparent they've crawled our site. Do you know why?

Answer:

For starters, you're not the only site that's affected. Google's cache dates and data hasn't been reliably current over the last year or so. There have been problems with 404 errors, out of date information, and so on.

Google's John Mueller says to "ignore" the cache date because Google doesn't always update the cache information when they crawl your site and reindex your page. They may choose to use the old cache information even if your site has updated and been reindexed.

Google also acknowledged a bug when switching over to mobile first indexing, which was causing a 404 error when clicking on the cache link.

There isn't any advice we can give other than 'don't pull your hair out' over the issue. It's not you, it's them. They're just not updating cache as often as they did in the past even though your pages are being crawled and reindexed.

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