Let’s understand what a ‘cache’ is before we get into Google Cache.

To start with,

How often have you gotten fed up with your desktop slowing down only to ask yourself…

What Is A Cache?

A cache is just a fancy term used to describe temporary memory. But wait, why do we call cache a temporary memory?

It’s simple. Cache allows us to gain access to users’ data quite faster without having to reload a website every time we use it. This is helpful when the data doesn’t change frequently, and we require it from time to time.

Let’s set a context:

When you visit a website repeatedly, your browser saves a version of that website on its memory so that every time the information doesn't have to be loaded from the website’s server. And so, browser cache helps websites that you have already visited load faster for you. This improves your browsing experience.

However, if there are too many websites whose cache has been saved in your browser’s cache memory, your browser starts getting slower. It’s why you’re often suggested to clear your cache (Ctr + R + shift).

Now that you know what Cache is, the next time your computer slows down, maybe you’ll be like -

Then, What Is Google Cache?

Like cache, Google Cache is also a temporary storage.

Only difference is that, Google keeps a snapshot, or a stored copy as HTML backups of the content of a website‌ that the users are searching for it can access in case the current page isn’t available for a lot of reasons, like for instance, when the website is temporarily unavailable on the internet for technical reasons.

Think of Google Cache as Plan B for your Plan A. Say you have a plan to achieve a goal this year, maybe to travel to a place. But what if it does not work out? Are you going to let it be or will you come up with a backup plan to travel some place else?

The point of Google Cache is exactly this. If, for some reason, you’re not able to get access to a webpage through the search results, Google shows you the backup webpage or search result that you want to gain the access to that it had last indexed.

And all the data is stored in the database called Google Cache as snapshots. These snapshots are stored when Googlebot crawls the website for indexing.

For A Marketer, How Does Google Cache Help You?

Like we mentioned how Google stores these snapshots in Google Cache, it helps marketers in two ways:

Improving User Performance:

Google Cache improves the user performance with backup webpages and does not leave the user high and dry when they want to search something on Google that’s somehow not available for technical reasons.

Providing with A Scaled-Down Version of Content:

Google Cache provides the marketers a scaled-down version of the content of a webpage. This happens for two reasons.

1. Say for some reason, your webpage stops working and isn’t available in search results. Google cache stores a copy of the content of your page so you don’t lose the content.
2. Say you’ve made some major changes to your product webpage, which isn’t relevant to what your target audience wants and so they’re not seeing your website anymore. The scaled-down version of your content helps you get access to the relevant content you earlier had on your webpage so you make changes accordingly.
3. For SEO purposes, the scaled-down version of the content of your webpage helps you to view your content exactly as the robot of Google views it. You get to see what keywords are being used, how appropriate the content is to a search, or is there any piece of content that is not relevant to the search that you can chuck off.

How Do You Get Access to A Cached Page?

1. On your Google Search, search for the query you want to find.

2. In the search results page, next to the URL of the site you want to see the cached version of, click on the three dots.

3. To go to the cached page, click ‘cached’ at the bottom right corner of ‘About this result’ popup card.

Another way is to use the ‘site’ operator before the URL, like: site:www.example.com .

This will show us how the webpage looked like the last time Google’s crawler visited it.