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When I want to look my website's cache on Google, it returns 404, how can I fix it?

in Internet by (552k points) | 592 views

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A few days ago I needed to access the google cache to see if I found a page that I had accidentally deleted and retrieve the content that was quite extensive. First of all I accessed a file and found nothing on that page, others if they were searched at different times, but specifically the one I was looking for was not (bad luck, it usually happens). I tried with google and when accessing with cache: <url to search> through the browser bar the result was always the same:

google cache

404 That's an error.

The requested URL /search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=cache%3<url_a_Buscar>&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8was not found on this server.That's all we know.

However, something that bothered me is that if I did a search in the search engine google on my site with site: <url to search> I found the url of the page I was looking for in the list of results of my website.

Reading in forums other people indicated that Google is having some other problem with the issue of the cache, but I did not find a solution to the topic that worried me.

I tried in several ways and it was impossible to recover the web page in question. However, a curious thing happened to me, I started looking for the same through the chrome browser of my mobile phone with cache: <url_a_buscar> and to my surprise there was the page, through the mobile version if I fully loaded the cache of Google. This page that had no way of seeing it through a computer or desktop version but could be viewed by mobile. In this way I was able to completely recover the page and not lose the content that is something that worried me. It is something curious and I share it because I have not read it looking for information on other pages and if someone else happens to try it.


by (552k points)
John Mueller from Google shared on Twitter a workaround many SEOs have been talking about for weeks. If you change the URL of the cache URL, you can get it to work.

So remove your URL and replace it with x.xyz/ and it should work, that is, if you click on the 404 cache URL first and then chage it:

Here are some examples:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JlcOHZi46tMJ:johnmu.com/ to http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JlcOHZi46tMJ:x.xyz/
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KinA-3j4EHcJ:https://www.rustybrick.com/ to https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KinA-3j4EHcJ:x.xyz/
The cool thing, this site has yet to move to the mobile first index, so this site's cache URL still works fine.

It is a known issue on Google's end - so no need to panic.

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