A question on cached pages

[janc]

Hi all.

I have been testing different ways of writing the text on the homepage of the website www document-management-solutions co.uk because we are ranking very low for the keyword Document Management Software.

I've recently learnt about pages being 'cached' and wanted to just clarify something.

The last time the page was cached was on 26th March. I have made changed to the homepage since then and wanted to see how it has affected our ranking.

Will I not be able to know if it has had a positive/negative effect until the next time our page is cached?

Thanks

[MashBonigala]

A cached page version is just a version that Google holds in cache and is not really related to their crawling are or to how you are ranked. If you have made changed to the keywords on the home page then you will have to wait till Google reindexes you site and the algorithm would decide the rankings.

In my experience, I have seen Googlebot come and crawl almost daily but the cached version was several weeks old.

[SEOAndy]

should point out there is also a difference between crawled, indexed and ranked.... though the later two are closely related. crawling is "hey look a new page" or "oh new content great" and it's then saved within google, this is then indexed - looking at what the content is about and it's relevance - then ranking comes along which is comparing.

[janc]

Thanks for your input!

So, with this in mind, how will I be able to know when this page has been 're-indexed' (which I assume would be when I will be able to see if the change has had a positive or negative effect)?

[MashBonigala]

You would simply have to keep checking the ranks as well as keeping an eye out on your Google Analytics to see any hits on your keywords and increase in traffic.