As a blogger or business owner, staying up to date with the current trends is very important. Whether it is related to marketing or the SEO world, constantly upgrading your website accordingly is the key factor to stay one step ahead of your competitors in the respective niche. The concept of Google cached pages is not something new but it is as important as other aspects of ranking a web page in SERPs.

Hopefully, you may have a basic idea of how cached web pages work. Certainly, Google cached pages are a little different when it comes to evaluating the different websites. As you already know Google crawlers keep visiting our published pages visiting regularly. It helps them index the new content that enters the internet from time to time.

Complete Overview Of Google Cached Pages

What are Google cached pages?

Google creates a snapshot during the crawling process. That specifies the structure and overall look for your web page at a particular time frame. But why does Google puts effort into completing this extra part of the process even if they can simply crawl the web pages? There is a solid reason for it. Going through the structure of a web page from time to time helps the search engine crawlers and others.

In order to go through the changes that have been made in the past few years. So they can determine whether any new content is added by comparing it directly with the old cached version from the servers. Hence Google cached pages are closely related to the indexing-related analysis for your different web pages.

Methods to view a cached webpage

Now if you have never tried before to view the cached version of your site or some other blog, there are a few ways to do so. Thankfully all of them are quite simple, especially for those people who already have a website of their own. But why it is important to view the cached version of your site? Well, doing so can help you in a lot of ways. Therefore, we have collected some proven methods which are useful for going through the different variations of the cached pages. Let’s have a closer look at them.

1. Different URL form

If you only wish to get the cached data for your website, this method is the best for you. Altering the website URL for showing the cached version of a specific web page is rather easy. Because all you have to do is put your website URL after the word cache in the search engine “cache: URL”. Later you need to click on the first result and it will show you a tab as shown below. Where you can choose to see either the text-only version or the complete source of the cached page.

2. Using Archive.org service

If you are familiar with the way back machine, it will be easier for you. Even if you have not used this service before, it is simple to use. Simply visit the Wayback machine and enter the URL you wish to analyze. After proceeding with the URL, it will show you a complete timeline via a calendar interface. Allowing you to go through the snapshots and sort out the dates when it was taken.

3. Search up on Google directly

The last method includes simply searching up your website on Google. Not to mention it is recommended to implement this method in a desktop computer or laptop. As the navigation becomes much easier, you can easily click on the three dots beside your website URL. Afterward, click on the cached button to view the cached version of any web page you like.

Benefits of utilizing Google cached pages

Improves site performance

Enhancing the overall site performance is essential in order to keep your bounce rate lower. Whereas, not many search engines promote blogs with a higher bounce rate. Utilizing Google cached pages in a way to improve your site performance may sound like a difficult task. However, with the right set of tools and knowledge, you can take advantage of this amazing feature.

Take a look at the previous snapshots of your web pages to summarize which blocks are slowing down the site performance. Go through the visual elements of your site that affect the overall SEO and the user experience as well. Additionally, you can trackback the progress of pages that used to perform slowly before.

Helps you determine the frequency of indexing

Indexing your new content within a few days of publishing is rather important from a successful blogger’s perspective. Especially if you have just started your blogging journey, make sure that Google is indexing your newly published content properly. Moreover, Google cached pages only appear when the crawlers complete crawling your web page at least once.

So if you are able to view more than one cached version of your web pages, it can help you estimate the crawling and indexing frequency in real-time. Not to mention essential data such as indexing status for certain web pages are provided in Google Search Console. However, this data can be misleading at times, so you can use the cached web pages feature to monitor the exact frequency.

Accurate competitor analysis

Monitoring your competitor’s progress over time is one of the most common SEO practices. Not to mention it helps in taking necessary decisions regarding your future content strategy. Hence, analyzing which changes your competitor sites are implementing can help you understand their strategy in some cases. Checking the cached version of your competitor’s web pages is not that difficult if you follow the right methods that we discussed previously.

Above all, if you are having a hard time dealing with tough competitors, using a powerful competitor analysis tool such as Raven tools is far better. No doubt it will save your time and efforts required for performing accurate competitor analysis but it will also help you with other improvements as well.

Final Thoughts

There are tons of different aspects within the SEO community. And it is our job to monitor and maintain them simultaneously in order to stay at the top of the competition. Concepts like Google cached pages may not seem like a big deal yet considering the possible outcomes, we highly recommend making necessary changes to your website depending on the situation.

In conclusion, Google features can be confusing sometimes. Not to mention they play an essential role in helping yours and other websites as well. Google cached pages provide faster loading for sure but make sure to go through the whole article before you decide to implement them. Do share this information with others and feel free to ask any questions in the comments section below.