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Some Old date showing in SERP
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I see some old date Jan 21 2013 showing up for some categories in Google search results. These are category pages and I do not see the date in view source. This is not a wordpress site or a blog page. We keep changing this page by removing/adding items so it is not outdated.
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Do you have this on any other pages? If so is there a similarity between any of them? Is there anything that you're using that auto generates dates anywhere?
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I'm actually kinda stumped. For whatever reason, Google is ignoring the sitemap date. Here's what I would do:
1. Even though the sitemap is valid, I'm still unclear if Google is reading it. The only way to know for sure is by checking the Sitemap function in Google Search console here and verifying indexation: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list
2. You could try to put a date on the page. Something like "Last Updated" at the bottom of the page.
3. A longshot, but you could add the <lastreviewed>Schema markup to the page, and see if Google honors that.</lastreviewed>
If you try any of these, let us know if any of them worked!
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Any tips? Manually submitted to Google but still has old date
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How odd. I'm not sure of the answer, but before we go any further I was hoping you could verify a couple of things;
1. In Google Search console, can you verify that your sitemaps are submitted and that Google is indexing/reading them? I would think since you have a "last mod" date in your sitemap it would send a signal to Google that the page was more up to date.
2. When looking at the cache of your page in Google, it doesn't look like all the resources are loading. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:example.com
Based on this, if you perform a fetch and render in Google console, does it show that you are blocking any resources?
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Please search gmax helmets in google and ours show up with date Jan 21 2013
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You sure the date is not picked by some additional details somewhere on the page itself? Or, are you able to share the URL?
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Hi there.
Go to Google Webmaster Tools/Search Console and request manual recrawl of that page.
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