Questions
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Rich Snippets not appearing in Search Results
The cache date and crawl date need not necessarily be the same. This was pretty evident till late 2006 but after that Google changed this to great extent but still there are lot of technical limitations where it is not possible or rather I must say not feasible or unnecessary (Google also uses the, 'if modified since' status to know if a page has been updated or not) to update the cache date every time they crawl a page. Here are two URLs that will give you more info in this regard: 1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-crawl-dates-in-the-google-cache/ 2. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2006/09/better-details-about-when-googlebot.html 3. Most importantly: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-cache-update-12686.html We see these cache date anomolies daily in our job and personally I have seen these for over a decade. Once you hit the main stream SEO where you start working for clients realtime, you will see these first hand. Regards, Devanur Rafi.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Devanur-Rafi0 -
Can rel="canonical" refer to another website page?
You can use it. Google supports cross domain rel="canonical" link element. You can check out the Google official blog for this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html. Google content guidelines say "There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible." So you can use it without any harm to your site.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | NitinRGoyal0