Google shows website last cached a month ago – Is it a Bug?

Google is showing the last cache date over a month ago for many websites. The majority of the websites is having the cache date around the 20th October to 25^th October. But normally the cache dates are fresher than the dates shown by the Google. Barry Schwartz has first reported the story on seroundtable.com.

We have also found the same issue with our website krishaweb.com. We have been updating the website on a regular basis, but just can’t identify the reason why the changes and updates have not been cached by the Google? Here is the snap shot of the Google showing last cache date on 21^st October.

Than we have tasted this for the Blog of Moz website. This is what we have found for moz.com/blog.

Obviously, Moz blog gets updated more frequently then Krishweb.com but this should not be the reason for the cache date to be so old. There have been lots of discussions going on about this topic on WebmasterWorld forum, Google Webmaster Help and Twitter about this issue. Google’s John Mueller have also participated in the discussion on twitter saying webmasters that they don’t need to worry about this issue as they are not considering it as a ranking signal. He twitted – “The cached date is separate of crawling & indexing, so I wouldn’t use that as a metric.”

It is not about the ranking signal that Google uses, but about the cache date that Google shows. Are the websites are not being cached by the Google or it is an error of Google. We have found lots of websites being cached last on 21^st October or on that date range. Have you experienced the same issue for your website or for the websites you are working for? Though it will not affect the website performance on SERP according to John Mueller but it certainly is the area of concern for webmasters.