Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does Google use dateModified or date Published in its SERPs?
-
I was curious as to the prioritization of dateCreated / datePublished and dateModified in our microdata and how it affects google search results. I have read some entries online that say Google prioritizes dateModified in SERPs, but others that claim they prioritize datePublished or dateCreated. Do you know (or could you point me to some resources) as to whether Google uses dateModified or date Published in its SERPs? Thanks!
-
Hello Claire,
From what I have observed Google seems to give a boost to fresh content, or even re-freshed content. I have seen this effect in the following situations:
- When updating the publish date on the page- When updating the last-mod date in the sitemap
- When refreshing a page WITHOUT updating the publish date (though I don't know if the dateModified tag was updated.)
As for empirical data, none that anyone is willing to share publicly. But this is a real effect that has been seen over and over again by myself, and several people I trust. Take it for what it's worth, but going back through old content and looking for ways to improve it, bring it up-to-date, and ensuring the last-mod tag in the sitemap gets updated is a very good use of your time as a marketer.
-
From what I observed, it seems to be the datePublished. Example is this page http://www.grimoires.de/buch/1/. You see "Diese Rezension wurde veröffentlicht am 31.12.2002 und zuletzt geändert am 16.05.2015." (with appropriate schema.org data) below the writer info in the main part. This info is not cheated or manipulated in any way, also used in the sitemap and accurate (it takes the unix time stamp of the time of creation/modification). In a SERP, 31.12.2002 appears. Same for another page that had the content (text) extended.
What might influence it: changes in 2015 were rather minimal - the meta description only, if I remember correctly. I am not sure, if the extent of a change might push google towards displaying the dateModified. It would seem reasonable to me to expect a "change threshold" but in the end I simply don't know. Anybody with hard empiric data?
Regards,
Nico
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
-
Using Google to find a discontinued product.
Hi Guys. I mostly use this forum for business questions, but now it's a personal one! I'm trying to find a supplier that might still have discontinued product. It's the Behritone C5A speaker monitor. All my searches bring up a plethora of pages that appear to sell the product... but they have no stock. (Wouldn't removing these pages make for a better internet?) No 2nd hand ones on eBay 😞 Do you have any suggestion about how I can get more relevant results... i.e find supplier that might still have stock? Any tips or trick I may be able to use to help me with this? Many thanks in advance to an awesome community 🙂 Isaac.
Algorithm Updates | | isaac6631 -
Dates appear before home page description in the SERPs- HUGE drop in rankings
We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc. A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap. Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012. This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs. The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard. When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything! We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | GoUp3 -
My Website No Longer Appears in Mobile Google Search but Does in Desktop...Why Is This?
For a long time my website has appeared in both desktop and mobile search in Google. Yet recently it has stopped appearing in mobile yet still on desktop. Any ideas why this is happening and how to rectify it please? Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | WSIDW0 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
Winning The New SERP Battle
I run a niche website (www.picnic-basket.com) that is approaching 10 years old. I have consistently added new content, performed redesigns, etc and WAS rewarded with a #1 placement on Google for my main keyword phrase for quite a long time. All our links are natural, no link-farms and I don't do exchanges either. I blog, write articles about our niche, have free cookbooks, delicious recipes and are always finding cool new products. FB & Twitter are also maintained. After Panda I'm now below the fold with amazon.com, bedbathandbeyond.com, worldmarket.com, overstock.com and brookstone.com all above me. These sites don't have anything to do with my niche other than just selling some items. ROI is horrible for me with PPC on this keyword phrase. I'm sure Googles' revenue has increased quite a bit in this category because users only see relevant websites up in the paid area. Through years of hard work I was finally able to beat my old niche competitors but I'm left wondering, How do I beat the "Big Boys"? Any advice for someone like me?
Algorithm Updates | | sunriseb0 -
Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
Hi girls + guys, a site of us were hit by a google update or a google penalty. We have lost 50% google traffic in one day (25th april, 2012). (Total visitors in average per day: 6k, yesterday: 3k) It's a german website, so I think google.de (germany) was updated. Our rankings in google.at (austria) are also affected, but it's not that bad as in google.de. We have not done any specific on page seo activities in the last two months. GWT doesn't have any message for us (no critical errors). After my first analyse I can say this: google has indexed 17k pages (thats fine) we are on 1st place with our domain name the last three days, the google traffic went up (+20%), but yesterday it was 50% below average (so -70%) last week we had a very good day, we had twice the traffic than normal, but this calmed down the following days we have lost number no. 1 places at two high traffic keywords. We had these no 1 rankings for years. We have been outranked by two of our competitors, but they have not done any onpage changes. We have lost a lot of positions at a lot of keywords. But there are also keywords which moved up. We have good content, useres are visiting 5 pages in average. No virus, no hacker (no hidden cloaking page) it's an old domain (2002) Lot of (good) inbound links Lot's of likes, g+. Good twitter activty. So, all in all I think it's more likely a ranking algo change than a penalty (a penalty for what reason?) My specific question(s): Is there any "check list" which could help me to find out the reason for this mess? What is the best strategy to regain the positions? New HTML code? New On page seo? (seomoz grades most of our important pages an A) Any idea would be appreciated! Best wishes,
Algorithm Updates | | GeorgFranz
Georg.1 -
Rankings changing every couple of MINUTES in Google?
We've been experiencing some unusual behaviour in the Google.co.uk SERPs recently... Basically, the ranking of some of our websites for certain keywords appears to be changing by the minute. For example, doing a search for "our keyword" might show us at #20. Then a few minutes later, doing the same search shows us at #14, and then the same search a few minutes later shows us at #26, and then sometimes we're not ranked at all, etc etc. I know the algorithm changes a lot, but does it really change every couple of minutes? Has anyone else experienced this kind of behaviour in the SERPs? What could be causing it to happen?
Algorithm Updates | | d4online0 -
Using Brand Name in Page titles
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner1