Hi,

If you search for my site in google and view the cached version it says last accessed on 7th of April however in my webmasters tools it says "Home page crawl:Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Mar 2, 2008."

Can anyone explain the difference between the two and why the vast difference in dates?

I'm still sliding in the searches and wondering if google hasn't actually been to my site since march 2nd and why this could be.

Google will crawl your site all the time.. But they only take cache snap shots every once in a while..

A cached version is a version of the same website that is saved to google's servers, while a crawl is where googlebots index your site.

ahh so a crawl is the one i need soon, and it will index any changes i have made. Im guessing that is when it will consider moving me up in the searches? (or down if im unlucky!)

Yup.. Cache is useful for some things, but getting crawled regularly is what matters most..

Yea the site crawl is all that really matters. Google Cache date really means nothing. Its just a snapshot of your current page that google keeps and only updates every once in a while. It means nothing for your position in the rankings.

Actually I think it's the other way around as far as importance. When a search engine crawls your page that doesn't necessarily mean they've changed anything in their index. They've just crawled the page. A crawl is not the same as indexing the page. A search engine might crawl a page only to find the links on the page that it will crawl next.

The cached version of the page is the copy they're using to determine results. The cached version of a page is the version in the index. When Google indexes your page they update the cache.

By the way Melanie I know I still owe you an email. I haven't forgotten and was planning on asking how things were going with the site.