Website is indexed by Google, but Google do not keep cached version

Question

I work as a developer of a CMS, which produces websites, powered by React. The website is prerendered and served with custom solution for GoogleBot. These days, we observed something strange - the sites are indexed in Google, but none of them has cached version in Google. My question is - how is that possible?

As I prefer not to point any domain, I will share as much data, as I can:

1. robots.txt is as simple as:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

2. There are no robots metatags;
3. The sites are managed by their own SEO teams and I guess, they take care for GSC properly;
4. The only thing that I think is out of order are the sitemaps. They are autogenerated, and their values are set by the CMS operator, but have same structure:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/en</loc>
    <changefreq>always</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  ...

The only problem I suspect is point 4 where most of the records are always/hourly, with priority of 1.0. Despite in the dev docs of Google it is said they are no longer taken in mind.

Any ideas here are highly appreciated! Thank you! Anton

Answer 1

Google may opt to cache certain results for a wide variety of reasons, for example:

• Speed/efficiency
• Consistency
• Mitigating downtime
• Q/A testing, especially around algorithm updates

Check for potential Cache-Control headers:

• Cache-Control: no-cache would certainly cause this.

MDN docs on Cache-Control