Cached page not found

[hawkwind dave]

Quick question...

Why does Google rank a site, but when i click on 'cached' it says page not found?

Surely if GG is ranking a page, it's crawled and cached the page in question.

This is something I've noticed occasionally over the years.

Any ideas?

[morestar]

Good question. I guess it could come up with a client every now and then and I'd be concerned too...

I found the following idea on this page about Google indexing at the Google Answers page:

Hi - the reason why google shows a page not found in the seventh postion on its results page for "queen mother" is that www.queenmother.org used to be in that position a few weeks ago.

This means that Google must have initially spidered the page correctly, because it was indexed in the results, but then www.whatever.org moved from its hosting company godaddy to infoquest and during this update of DNS entries, google somehow cached the "page not found" at www.whatever.org, since this domain was still being resolved to the old ip address on godaddy's server, which by then had been allocated to another company.

I've never encountered such a scenario but maybe someone else has and might be around in a while to give us a better explanation...

[John]

Have you checked the date the page was last cached? Maybe it has been deleted or renamed in the meantime.

[deepsand]

Quick question...

Why does Google rank a site, but when i click on 'cached' it says page not found?

Surely if GG is ranking a page, it's crawled and cached the page in question.

This is something I've noticed occasionally over the years.

Any ideas?

Do you mean that:

• The cache image was that of a 404 page; or
• The cache link returned a 404 in real time?

The latter would be either a Google or DNS hiccup; no way to determine with certainty which.

The former can occur for various reasons that resulted in page's host returning a 404 or Custom 404. Recently helped a member solve just such a case here at Problems Getting Site Relaunched Crawled .

[hawkwind dave]

Thanks for replies people.

The page hasn't move hosting
Cant see a cached date be cause the cached page isn't found

the error message when clicking 'cached' on the result is:

Your search - cache:GktC-XDFOEwJ:www.keswickcabcompany.co.uk/ cockermouth taxi - did not match any documents.

The site is relatively new, but even so, if google is ranking it (page two for 'cockermouth taxi', page one for 'keswick taxi' for me)... surely it'd have a cached page to display.

[Clint1]

Thanks for replies people.

The page hasn't move hosting
Cant see a cached date be cause the cached page isn't found

the error message when clicking 'cached' on the result is:

Your search - cache:GktC-XDFOEwJ:www.keswickcabcompany.co.uk/ cockermouth taxi - did not match any documents.

The site is relatively new, but even so, if google is ranking it (page two for 'cockermouth taxi', page one for 'keswick taxi' for me)... surely it'd have a cached page to display.

I see this all the time and I've also wondered what their problem is. I'm glad you asked. Naturally it usually happens on a large page where I have to end up searching for the searched-for words on the page manually. It's pretty bad when G's own links are "404's" or are at least "missing".

Let's see if we can find any explanations here.

EDIT: Hmmm: "If you analyze closely, you would find that this occurs only to pages indexed a few hours back." May be.

[Clint1]

I've never encountered such a scenario but maybe someone else has and might be around in a while to give us a better explanation...

Here's an example I found where you can see it.

[Clint1]

EDIT: Hmmm: "If you analyze closely, you would find that this occurs only to pages indexed a few hours back." May be.

I doubt that's the case because that link I found ("Here's an example I found where you can see it".) is from 2005! Could be that the actual "Cached" link for it has changed since then and it may work now, but a search for ictlab.tyict.vtc.edu.hk/~040003496/IVE_Notes/Operating_Systems_and_Architecture/ITE2Ans/chapter2.doc returns nothing but the page on which I found it, so there's no way of testing that.

[deepsand]

The problem is not isolated to the item in question.

For example, on the SERPs for the query string www.keswickcabcompany.co.uk/, the 2nd item's cache link,
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hgq2RHO7yY0J:www.freeindex.co.uk/profile(keswick-cab-company)_344984.htm+www.keswickcabcompany.co.uk/&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com, also yields a Google 404.

[readymademlm]

I think you can try webmaster tools and fetch your page you want to cache..