On bestautoinsurance.com I uploaded files that had the wrong title tags and the pages were indexed. This occurred over a month ago.
Since then I have uploaded the same files, with the same names, but with corrected page titles. These pages have been crawled AFTER the corrected page titles were uploaded.
The problem is that while almost all of the pages were recrawled after the new page titles were uploaded, only a dozen or so pages are showing the updated page titles in SERPs.
But only the Texas page’s title has been updated. I’m really confused as to why Google would recrawl these pages but only update the title tags on a fraction of the pages crawled.
Google crawls pages, caches them, and then updates its index with what it has picked up on the crawl. The “updating its index” bit can take a bit longer then the first two, depending on all sorts of random factors - I wouldn’t worry about the indexed version being a week behind the cached version - a month, I would start to get concerned.
Well I wouldnt worry, fact is Google will index the title tags when it gets round to it. Might just take them a bit longer to do. Google goes at Google pace not yours - I know it is frustrating but just have faith they will index your title tags.
@nancy12 - I have a site where pages are being crawled and cached, but changes I made to a page’s title tag is not being indexed, even three weeks after being cached.
In response to some of the answers/suggestions, a lot of the pages were crawled and cached about three weeks ago. I wasn’t aware that Google doesn’t update it’s index at the same time as the crawling/caching, so that’s good to know.
But isn’t three weeks a long time for the indexed title tags not to be updated? The site seems to be getting crawled and cached fairly regularly. I just can’t understand why the page’s title tags would be ignored.
I guess my only option is to wait and see if the indexed page titles are updated over time?
But, click on that link you sent me, and check out the second link for California. That page was cached on Nov 21st, but the Google search page is using a title tag that’s not on the actual cached version (hopefully that makes sense).
But people seem to be saying that what appears on the SERPs may take a while to sync up with what is being cached? Is there an amount of time that would seem way too long for those two things to sync? One month?
Well it varies, no one can give a definitive answer because I have had title tags updated in a few weeks before but other times much longer. My advice would be not to worry, if it hasnt corrected after 6 weeks then seek professional help as there might be something up that you’re not seeing. Other than that - keep pressing on with other seo work such as link building.
Google tends to update the content of a site to reflect changes based on it’s perceived importance of that page/site. This is normally indicated by PageRank (PR is a direct contributor to the rate and depth Google crawls sites).
So for a low-value (in Google’s eyes) page, it could take a long time…more than a month or so, especially if the page is actually indexed already.
If you get some new links to site from sites that have good Pr they seem to update faster. I have seen some pages take long time to update and others not long after some new links are added.