Gone From Google Cache: ‘These Terms Only Appear In Links Pointing To This Page’

I’m not sure when this happened but I dont see any mention of it anywhere.

After hiding the cached results link in the preview panel that now pops up in search results, it seems as though Google has now stopped telling us via the cached results:

“these terms only appear in links pointing to this page“

While this was always a pretty inaccurate statement for the cached pages to declare (as sometimes the keywords were not in links but from other sources – for instance, from a previous cached version of the page).

I always found this information in cached pages useful – when looking at backlink profiles to investigate weird ranking results – or ranking anomalies/false positives.

This feature of Google cache was also very useful when testing, for fun, some aspects of seo and link building, especially anchor text attribution. It was always useful to really investigate why a page ranked for a keyword, for instance, when the word was not on the actual page. You could often catch a glimpse of link building efforts that worked looking at this – which led to a few surprises, more often than not.

Now Google cache only tells us ‘

These search terms are highlighted:

Pity.

Yet another small window on determining how Google might ‘work,’ at a granular level, quietly goes away.