Google showing a Cached option but then giving a 404
-
2 weeks ago my home page plus some others had a 301 redirect to another domain for about 1 week (due to a hack).The original pages were then de-indexed and the new bad domain was indexed and in effect stole my rankings.Then the 301 was removed/cleaned from my domain and the bad domain was fully de-indexed via a request I made (this was 1 week ago).Then my pages came back into the index but without any ranking power.Now when I perform a search for my domain my home page is listed with an option to view the Cache. Clicking on the Cache brings up a 404 error.So why is Google showing the Cached option but doesn't have the cached file? How do I get Google to properly update it's Cache or show a cached copy?
-
Oh wow....it's back!!! For over a week I've been stressing with this and the lost traffic/sales.
Yeehaw I can now enjoy my weekend. Although I still have some forensics to focus on but still, a big relief.
Lynn, I may not have checked again until tomorrow so you definitely made my night. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and for your feedback. Have a good weekend.
-
Hmm, the cache issue is strange, I really have no idea why it is behaving like that.
I can say that from where I am the original site seems to be ranking for keywords that I assume are some of your major ones and if you look at the cached version it shows the site as expected. It is a bit of an odd situation, might be wise to hold on for another week or so and see if rankings/traffic return and the index seems to sort itself out again.
-
Hmmm, yeah that could be it. It's not so much a technical issue but the real problem (and why I'm asking about the cache) is my pages have been re-indexed everyday for the past week although I have yet to see them rank. It's as if the 301 value transfer is still in effect or my pages are now being seen as duplicates and therefore in the supplemental index. Therefore I don't really care about the actual cached page.
Last night I updated my footer to try and force a refresh. I just checked and it's still the same but I just noticed something interesting. For one query for the home page you will see a snippet from cloned domain and the cache will generate a 404. But for another query you will get a snippet from the original domain and the cached page is functional.
So it seems that depending on the query Google will look at previous indexes and show older snippets/caches. Does this make sense?
-
Hi Danny,
I would think the 404 is showing because the last cache of google's was of the site when the 301 was in effect and now that site has been de-indexed (or something along these lines). As long as there are no technical issues still effecting the original site then just be patient, the next time google comes crawling then the cache will be updated and you should be fine. You are probably just about the only one actually looking at the cache anyway!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google crawl drop
the crawl request of my company site: https://www.dhgate.com/ has dropped nearly over 95%, from daily 6463599 requests to 476493 requests at 12:00am on 9th, Oct (GMT+8). This dramatic dropping trend not only showed in our GSC crawl stats report but also our company's own log report. We have no idea what’s going on. We want to know whether there is an update of google about crawlling, or is this the issue of our own site? If something is wrong with our site, in what aspects would you recommend us to check, analyze and accordingly optimize?
Technical SEO | | DHgate_20140 -
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
How do I get out of google bomb?
Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ozererim0 -
0 Google Backlinks
A sudden drop in the number of google backlinks. Earlier this month I had 15 google backlinks and now all of a sudden I have none. My google impression has also dropped drastically, my website's average is 10000 impression per day and now we have none. I have increased the crawler's speed on the website, would this be the cause of it? 4pmdesign.com
Technical SEO | | 4pm0 -
Google and QnA sites
My website has a QnA site - a bit like this one except it's not private to premium members. It is a page with a left colomn for category links and it has a list of recently asked questions, each question is a link to view the full question and answers etc. Does google know this is a QnA ? Or will it say - hey, there are far too many links on this page, tut tut. Is there anything I can do to help it understand what the page is.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
Why is this url showing as "not crawled" on opensiteexplorer, but still showing up in Google's index?
The below url is showing up as "not crawled" on opensitexplorer.com, but when you google the title tag "Joel Roberts, Our Family Doctors - Doctor in Clearwater, FL" it is showing up in the Google index. Can you explain why this is happening? Thank you http://doctor.webmd.com/physician_finder/profile.aspx?sponsor=core&pid=14ef09dd-e216-4369-99d3-460aa3c4f1ce
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
404 help
Hello all, firstly let me apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question. I have a site www.promptresponseaccidentmanagement.com which gets a 200ok when checked for crawl issues, however pages such as /whiplash-injury-compensation-claims.php , /road-traffic-accident-compensation-claims.php and quite a few more return a 404. That's fine (usually) as I can quite happily fix that most of the time. However if you actually go to those pages in your browser, or click through to them on any part of the site you will see that they are in fact not redirecting to a 404 and everything is fine!? Any body got any ideas? Best H
Technical SEO | | haydyn0