“Google is not only a search engine giant, but a whole toolkit of innovation and newness. It does not remove features, it retires them. It does not add new features, it innovates the whole scope.”
If you have scrolled enough, you might have come across a news stating “Google Removes Cache”. The news has ignited the whole of social media into a debate community. The reactions are justified enough! In a world where everything, right from what’s cooking in dinner to the queries behind the biggest business decisions is dependent on the search button of Google, every change in it is an opportunity to grow.
Simply, Google has long been a trusted ally for users seeking quick access to their older version of web content through its cache feature. Sadly, it’s no more there on the web!
Google’s cache search operator: cache:example.com
This convenient tool allowed us to recover previously stored versions of web pages, even when the original content was temporarily inaccessible. With Google’s recent decision to remove the cache feature, many are left wondering how to access cached pages now. Let’s understand alternative methods to reclaim that valuable resource, ensuring you can still find the information you need, even when the internet presents challenges.
Before jumping into the comprehensive discussion of the reasons behind this step of Google. You need to have a look at this statement by Google SearchLiaison. The disclosure was made in response to the curiosity raised by Barry Schwartz, a technologist and a popular technical blogger.
This unexpected yet totally awakening series at X gave a lot more insights into how Google is working for its user experience as well as keeping its relevance up to the mark. Let’s dive deeper and understand the top 5 reasons behind this removal:
Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, expressed how the cache feature was initially designed to enable users to get access to the older versions of web pages when the loading issues were severe and commonly faced. Witnessing the significant improvements in the internet and its increasing reliability, the necessity of the feature was felt decreasing and soon to be extinct.
Google’s cached view was perceived as a “basically unmaintained legacy feature”. This reflected that Google considered the cache as outdated, no longer aligning with its current technology capabilities and users’ needs. As technology grows, keeping the older features that seem less necessary can divert resources from developing new tools and services.
With the rise of instant and digestible content aroused from social media and real-time media updates, the shape of users’ needs has been drastically changed. Now they want the data that keeps them up-to-date. This change in behaviours has made the idea of keeping cached versions significantly irrelevant.
Sullivan hinted at the possibility of discovering other ways to provide older versions of web content, such as links to the Internet Archive. This can better serve users’ needs for accessing how webpages have altered over time, reflecting a shift toward more relevant tools for past content rather than maintaining a cache feature that had lost its utility and relevance.
By eliminating features that are less critical and do not contribute much to marketers and surfers, Google can focus on improving the core elements of its search engine interface, enhancing user experience, and ensuring that the tools available are up-to-date and effective.
In short, as always, this update on Google Cache Checker has been proven to be a strategic move. The goal seems to be more user-centric, promoting simplicity and relevance.
Not diplomatic, but after knowing Google’s perspective, it is not necessary to create an all-new perception regardless of personal or user opinion. Even after the raised demand for real-time updates, there are several reasons why cached pages might be an urgent need for an hour.
These are some most touched points showcasing the importance of Google Cached Pages for SEO:
Websites’ cached pages can play an important role in enhancing your website’s visual optimization by providing insights into how Google’s bots interpret your visual content. This optimization can be done through bot visibility, contextual relevance, identifying content gaps and monitoring changes effectively.
Monitoring your pages is cached and indeed frequently offers a great insight into their relevance. A timestamp on your cached page indicates its last update. Generally, the more often you cache your website, the more appropriate Google considers your content. Google used to re-cache pages more frequently when they’re regularly updated with fresh content.
If you face unexpected content after entering into a cached link, it might be possible due to content replica or duplication. This is because when Google crawls your website and finds similar pages, it might not index them separately, ultimately resulting in multiple pages being cached under one link. If you notice this happening, prioritize optimizing those pages to make their content unique or consider deleting unnecessary pages and creating redirects.
By comparing their cached pages to their live pages, you can spot recent changes they’ve made. They may have optimized their content for better keyword usage or improved crawler-friendliness, which could provide valuable lessons for your strategy.
Powered by GSC (Google Search Console)- URL Inspection tool lets you extract the information about the webpages that are indexed by Google. Through this tool, you’ll be able to learn about the date and time Google last crawled the page, whether it can index the page or not and most importantly, how Google saw the page when indexing it.
The URL Inspection tool provides on-point insights into how Google has indexed a page than Google’s cached pages because the tool does not face any trouble in processing JavaScript code.
The Rich Results Test tool, developed by Google, is a convenient option for anyone who wants to optimize their web pages for search results. This tool allows you to test a specific page to see if it can display real-time and rich results, which are special features that help your content stand out on Google’s search engine results page (SERP). When you enter a URL into the tool, it provides crucial information, such as whether Google was able to crawl the page and the date and time of that crawl.
After testing a URL, this tool reveals how Google sees the page, including HTML structure and how it appears now in screenshots. It helps you make changes so your site is more likely to rank for desirable rich results and attract more visitors.
Trusted by millions of marketers and owned by Internet Archive, Wayback Machine is an online tool that showcases the database of web pages of how they looked on different timelines. The tool allows them to track the changes over time and understand the results likewise. It is one of the best too if you are searching for a Google cached pages alternative.
In contrast, the caches of search engines (Google or others) that offer only one past version of a page the page’s content when they last cached it.
The retirement of this nostalgic tool has been proven as one of those events for webmasters and SEO professionals that can affect the whole SEO or digital marketing efforts. See, how this step by Google has become a challenge for marketing enthusiasts.
→ The Change as a Challenge:
A great resource for diagnosing index problems, i.e. Google Cache, no longer exists. SEO experts in India now have to rely more often on other tools that might take time or might be new to the marketers. This shift might cause difficulty in operation, time consumption and troubleshooting during the whole process.
→ The Change with its Solution:
If seen with sincerity, this is an opportunity to be more focused on updates in real-time and improve for the visitors to see the information fresh and relevant as this enhances rank in search engines and triggers a lot of traffic.
Other than that, marketers can use web performance and content variation analyses to back up the process with SEO Tools. Digging into analytics, user experience, and competitor analysis becomes important. This change might make SEO more strategic in terms of flexibility and urgency for improvement. With this transition, a marketer can assume their position within this saturated digital marketplace and speak to their audience much better.
Google has always been the master behind the game of pioneering the digital market. No wonder why it is being considered as the search engine giant. With its ability to tap into the potential market and extract the most powerful insight, it has been able to revolutionise the way the market interacts now and then.
We just learnt about the news “Google Removed Cache” and what alternatives marketers can make a comeback. If you’re a digital marketer who has been religiously invested in cached files but does not know what to do now, outsourcing SEO excellence from reputed marketing agencies like W3era can help you with their SEO expert services.
Daily Search Marketing tidbits for savvy pros.
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