Many of our customers receive a no results page when viewing their Searchspring-powered pages through Google's cache. The reason for this is quite simple. We'll use the following URL as an example:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_TYeGXPlEf4J:www.mysite.com/mycategory.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
When this page loads one of the first things Searchspring AJAX Catalog does is look for a search query. Since Google is using a "q=" parameter the AJAX Catalog sees this as a search query and will use the portion of text following it as a search query for the page. In this case, the text "cache:_TYeGXPlEf4J:www.mysite.com/mycategory.html" would be used as a search query. Obviously, this is not a good search query and will return zero results.
While this may be worrying at first, there is really nothing to worry about here. The cache isn't actually used by Google for crawling purposes. It used to be a common case to use this cache to check the "crawl-ability" of a site, but that is no longer true. If you would like to check how well Google can crawl your site you should be using the "Fetch as Google" tool that Google has made available. You can find more information about this tool at the link below.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.