In early 2024, Google removed the cache link from search results. Now it's time to disable Google Cache altogether.
A cache is a copy of a website stored by Google. The "cache:" operator provided access to a backup version of a page when it was, for example, temporarily unavailable or had been deleted. In the past (before it made its way into Google Webmaster Tools and then Google Search Console), it was also an indicator of the date a page was last indexed.
Google announced back in January that the "cache:" operator, which shows the state of a page from Google's cache, would disappear in the future.
You're going to see cache: go away in the near future, too.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@searchliaison</a> is the cache link in the search results gone forever?</p>— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) <a href="https://twitter.com/rustybrick/status/1752087793642185003?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 29, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
And that future has just happened.
Currently, checking the cache is impossible, as you can see from our website.
What does this mean for us?
On the one hand, this is not a great change, as the operator has not been 100% reliable for some time now.
Often, even the "cache:" date itself was inconsistent with the last indexed date shown by Google Search Console. The cached page itself, was also out of date (compared to both the currently available version of the page and the index shown in GSC).
On top of that, "cache:" and especially its text version did not match the result Google saw after interpreting the page with JS.
Martin Splitt himself claimed that it was an "obsolete,unmaintained legacy feature " of the search engine(unmaintained legacy feature):
1) The cached view is a basically unmaintained legacy feature
2) The issue you describe is probably caused by something the sites in question do and has nothing to do with Wikipedia or the sites being major sites specifically
- Martin Splitt (@g33konaut) April 14, 2021
On the other hand, we know many SEOs who were still happy to use it. Even at non.agency we had "cache devotees"
who naturally remembered Google's comment, but the cache itself was a quick way for them to check the approximate date of the site's last indexation. Especially when these were sites we didn't have access to in Google Search Console!
So currently, there is no option to check even just such an approximate date of the last indexation of the site, if we do not have access to its GSC.
Too bad, but oh well, Google tends to kill many features, services or tools - even the useful ones.
Is there an alternative to Google Cache?
First of all, Google Search Console should be an alternative.
In GSC, you will find a URLInspection Tool (URL Inspection Tool).
It is used to check the status of a page indexed by Google and whether a URL can be indexed.
In Search Console, we can get information on date, indexing status and errors, crawl errors and page display information.
The second alternative to the cache is the Wayback Machine.
Link to Wayback Machine can be found recently after clicking the three dots next to the search result.
On the right side you will see a view from which you will go to information about the site.
In the next view we have a link to the Wayback Machine in the Internet Archive.
Google's decision has been widely reported around the world.
We have no choice but to pass this information on and use Google's resources in other ways.
