Google shows date in the SERPS for the homepage
-
Hi SEO's
we've build a site and our now trying to rank it but it won't go up despite of regular new unique content and a higher DA than most competitors. All tools like MOZ en Yoast SEO show green lights so we're kinda out of ideas right now.
Till we saw the date in the SERPS for the meta description. This gives us the idea that Google sees it as a post and not as a page which might explain the low ranking. However there are no technical causes we can think off for Google to show the date. Any ideas on this matter? Could it be that Yoast SEO is causing this even although we tell it not to show dates?
Love to hear from you!
-
We've took the date out of the code. I think it might have an indirect effect on the ranking, but off course we're also focussing on content and authority.
Thanks for the reply
-
Hey Roderick,
It looks like the dates are no longer showing in the SERPs (at least on my end). Either way, I wouldn't get too hung up on the dates contributing to lower rankings, it's the likely the result of many other factors. Sorry this answer isn't more helpful but I would focus on other areas your site can improve on from an SEO perspective rather than the date.
-
Sitemaps yes, robots.txt correctly yes, no strange things in Search Console and Analytics, preferred domain set, platform WordPress: www.villavibes.nl we (removed the date from the latest blog post now so maybe it doesn't show up anymore if you check).
Don't know if the date would have a direct impact on ranking but indirect people may click on it less as they think it's a post instead of a page..
Thanks for your reply!
-
Do you have all the proper sitemaps set up? Robots.txt set up correctly? Are you seeing anything strange in Google Analytics or in Webmaster Tools? Have you set a preferred domain in Search Console? What platform is your website built on? Are you able to supply a link to the site so we can take a look and/or run some crawls to check it out?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is Google Filling in Search Forms?
Hi Mozers, Is it true that Google will fill in search forms and thus generate potentially thousands of pages by itself? We have a spike in number of pages indexed and it corresponds with the time we added an advanced search form to the site... Thanks for the advice! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Truncated sitelinks in SERP
Anyway, I've seen these pop up for certain searches (not all). I'm curious as to how these truncated sitelinks appear. When searching for a company, the full sitelinks appear with descriptions and the like, but these little ones are a little new to me (apologies, I don't know if they have an official name). Is there a way to get them to appear for our page? Or more importantly, does it matter? iZlJZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Parker8180 -
Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS
Fellow mozzers, we need your help We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country: flowtracksurf.be → Belgium flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL. Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobe
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be. .BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering. Data shows us that .NL : In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA) In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools) We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks) When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on? On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be. Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?0 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Google Phone Numbers
What process is performed to get a company's phone number to show as "A" on google maps. Google displays the phone number for the company on the map as "A" first. It would be beneficial to get that position. Is there a sub-category of seo that does this? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers, Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened? My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered. I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered. I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed. I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten. I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened. If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland! 🙂 Thanks, Shane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaneod0 -
Google Places Alternatives
Hello, I have been looking into Google places alternatives. Any suggestions? On a related note. I am based in the UK and looking to add a UK business to Bing Local but having read this thread ( - http://www.bing.com/community/maps/f/12264/t/653672.aspx -) I don't think it's possible. Anyone had any luck or experience? Cheers dj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0