Google cache date - should I be worried if it's old for a daily-updated site?
 

I run a mainstream niche blog on WP and like clockwork, Google had been caching my blog homepage (which basically only shows the latest post) on each day I'd make a new post. For whatever reason, the cache date showing on the SERP has been and still is Sept 29 despite posts each weekday and yesterday having done a bunch of sitewide page changes and a new page created. The sitemap has been getting sent like it should with each post/change (I use the sitemaps plugin and Google Webmaster Tools). I have "Let Google determine my crawl rate" and it doesn't appear from the crawl data as if Google has stopped crawling the site or anything. Should I be worried that the cache date isn't updating? I didn't make any major changes on that date or anything...the changes I made yesterday were fairly major but I thought if anything that would have kick-started the caching again and it hasn't.

I'm not necessarily seeing SERPs drop yet, but usually when things are going like normal, I'll be in "Past 24 Hours" and "Past Week" page 1 on my target term and while I'm still on "Past Week" page 1, it's showing on that as my page last being updated 6 days ago. Any thoughts on what could be happening?

Anyone??

would be super great if google could instantly satisfy everyone. submit sitemap - all pages there in their serps right away

So that eliminates caching altogether, including to my users? That's not really what I want - I just want Google to do what they had been doing for several months now which is cache the page soon after new posts have been made (cache date still Sept 29 today btw :().

They had been doing to for me for over 6 months then all of a sudden stopped. I wouldn't have been expecting it if they hadn't been DOING it.

Can anyone give me reasons why this might possibly happen? That's all I'm really looking for so I can investigate further and see if there may be something I need to fix or something I can do to put google back on its patch.

Sometimes it's just a case of cache lag. Personally, I've never worried about it at all.

Have your rankings dropped any? Is this the same on other domains of yours?

I'll try not to worry - hopefully it'll catch up soon then. I wasn't sure if it was a common thing or something I should be concerned about.

As far as my rankings go, I had noticed I was generally go up on the weekends and then back down during the week - this past weekend it didn't do that, just pretty much stayed where it was and is now creeping down a bit. My main concern was that I normally maintain pretty high rankings in the "Past 24 hours" and "Past Week" for the term (which means something because they're generally time-sensitive offers people are looking for and loads of sites online are filled with old inactive ones), and now with the outdated cache, I'm completely out of each because Google's cache is now over a week old. Still, I haven't seen a significant drop in traffic or anything so I'll try not to worry and hope that it get back on track at some point.