Lately I’ve been wondering if directory editors like at Dmoz, and the many others, really go into G site cach very much.
I guess it would give an indication of a more immediate history, but not much. If stabilization is a factor they might look elsewhere, like to WayBack Machine or a screenshot site – which may or may not tell them anything, only from years ago . Does it really matter if the site has been upgraded unless they have possibly already seen it?
It seems they’d be more concerned with the quality of the current site and how it operates and PR value.
Are there any editors that could weigh in here?
The present status of the site and its architecture is important for seo. Way back machine can give us idea of how the site appeared before certain period of time.
DMOZ has been dead for a long time, and to be frank I doubt it has any influence on search engine rankings any more. It may have survived it it wasn’t crooked in every aspect, but its reputation is in tatters and it’s not received any attention for at least half a decade.
In terms of site caching, I’d be very shocked if Google didn’t keep some sort of private cache of the changes made on a site, similarly to how a distributed source control tool works. However, this would always be nothing but rumour as no one here would know otherwise (or at least couldn’t disclose it).
My real question here is if the editors of main directories access the cache pages of a site, when doing their evaluations. I’m trying to get a handle on this.
They’re human, so I guess it depends from user to user.
I’ve known some people who at once were DMOZ editors, and their process was pretty basic. They checked out the site, checked who was linking to it and had a look around any forums or chat rooms they may have ran. They also did a quick check to see if there were any affiliated sites. If everything passed then they got in.
If we’re talking about smaller link directories a lot of them barely visit the site, let alone do any background checks. If a site looks legit they typically always get in if there’s someone around.