I have a page on my site with a PR of 3, however it is not cached by google. How can this be?
google even shows it having a few backlinks. I'm confused.

A few questions.

1. According to what does this page have PR3.

2. How are you determining that the page is not cached.

3. Why is it important that the page is cached? Do you by chance mean indexed?

1. I have a google pageranking tool I use from google. It gives the PR of any site I visit.

2. go to google and type cache:http://anysite.com and you will see if the page is "cached" or "indexed" by google.

3. In order for any page to come up on their search engines, it must be "cached" or "indexed" by them.
It's basically a snapshot of your page on the day it was crawled.

Well I wasn't asking the questions because I didn't know I was asking why these things were important to you personally.

1. Page rank calculators are often buggy. If you're using Google's Toolbar it might be giving you a bogus number. What's the specific URL you're talking about.

2. A page does not need to be cached to showup in google's index, in fact, you can specify a page that you do not want to be cached, which can still be indexed, but google won't cache it. If you're worried whether or not the page is in the index I'd suggest using the "site:" operator (site:example.org)

3. Like I said above, not having a site cached does not necessarily mean that it's not in the index.

Chances are the PR figure you're getting is wrong. No page with PR 3 would be unindexed.

Are you talking about your homepage? That has PR3. You can view Google's cache .

Hope that helps!

No it's another page on my site http://certified-inspector.com/abc001.htm

When I try to get to that page I'm redirected to this "http://www.lycos.la/error.html"

Is that page new? Chances are the toolbar calculator is guessing what the PR for that page is based on the domain (which has PR 3).

Also, a bit off topic, but what's with the filenames? abc001.htm, abc002.htm, abc003.htm, etc.

I just clicked on it and it went right to my site. The page used to be my homepage before I created an idex page. It is the original page when my site was created.

as far as the filenames...for some reason or another, that's how my site was created by my program. and by the time I learned about site building, all the pages were cached and I didn't want to lose any rankings by changing the page extension names.

I agree that the PR is just a guess by the Toolbar based on the site the page resides in. This is not unusual behavior - and once Googloe actually lists the page the PR should drop with the next PR update.

...and don't ask when the next PR update will be! (it's an all-to-common question in the SEO world and nobody knows).

As far as the filenames are concerned. You would do a lot of good for yourself if you made those file names descriptive of page content.

For example...

If the page contains information for sellers you might name the file something like "seller-information.html".

You could do this manually or using something like mod_rewrite, but that might be a bit out of your realm so don't worry about it for now.

When I try to access your site via http://certified-inspector.com I get the lycos error page. However, when I try to access http://www.certified-inspector.com I get the page. Are you using some kind of re-direct for this site? There is a chance that your host doesn't have the DNS configured correctly.

you mean like this? http://certified-inspector.com/Tips.htm
Or http://certified-inspector.com/buyers.htm
or http://certified-inspector.com/Sellers.htm
or http://certified-inspector.com/Pricing.htm
or http://certified-inspector.com/Quote.htm

sorry...just having fun...and yes, I know all about the taboo question on when the next PR update will be, and no, it's not out of my league...I've learned quite a bit in the last year doing the site on my own.
I edit all my pages now directly from my server and write my own html to make it work and look the way I want. I'm still learning, but so are we all.

no redirect at all. That's my site name, and when I click on those links it goes right to my site. it's not necessary to put the www in front.

the link in my signature worked for you and that goes to http://certified-inspector.com . Maybe it's your computer?

Thanks for the help guys! Not sure why but that page used to be cached. It may have been dropped as it used to be an exact duplicate of my index page before I changed content a couple of days ago.

Yes, the duplicate content would cause the page to be removed from the index.

Do you think it is possible that it will be re-indexed now that the content is different? or should I just change the page name and wait for it to get indexed? I'd hate to change the extension as this page is ranked high on yahoo and msn for my keywords.

It will eventually be re-indexed, assuming googlebot visits your site regularly. If you change the extension you can always redirect (301 moved perm.) or use mod_rewrite if your server has that module installed.

It was the computer cause the weird lycos error? Who knows what that was about.

I wasn't trying to suggest that anything was out of your league, just saying that the complexity of mod_rewrite can be confusing if you're just starting out.

"Cached" and "indexed" are two different things. You can be indexed without being cached. Most search engines, including Google, allow for a webmaster to elect to not have their content archived (cached)for very legitimate reason. That is the purpose of the "no archive" tag.

The page you're so worried about is practically identical to your home page (which is indexed), so it is probably being filtered out of the search engine returns as duplicate content.

So I saw that advanced access lets me set up a 301 redirect via their site. When I forward from my hosting company, do I just check the box for "redirect URL forwarding" instead of masked then?