SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
-
Hi Moz friends,
I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd).
This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30.
As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance.
This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct.
The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic.
I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here.
Thank you in advance!
-
Yeah, I'd do the same. Another option would be (if it is your video) to re-upload the video to YouTube, that way it gets a new very recent date.
-
Hi All,
Here's an update!
As of today, Wednesday November 16, all of our posts are now up-to-date since removing all embedded videos on Sunday, November 13. We started seeing about more than half fixed yesterday and the rest today. SERPs show the accurate date and traffic has gone back to normal. For one of our sites, we fetched in Google Search Console which took a day less; however, with the others, we waited to see how long it would take Google to naturally re-crawl and it took about 3-4 days.
I suggest removing all YouTube embedded videos (if that's a feasible task for you) to play it safe for now during the peak holiday season. We preferred to do this for our sites because we aren't sure when exactly Google plans on fixing this. All videos have been changed to direct links in the mean time. All has been fixed.
Hope it all works out for you guys and thanks for the help.
-
It makes me feel a lot better this is a widespread thing. Hopefully it fixes soon! Unfortunately i've already removed all of my videos. Don't want to take a chance with this time of year.
-
It was mentioned yesterday on SE Roundtable, seems that Google are aware of it, see here.
-
Edward, it looks like both of us have experienced the same issue (as well as craze trying to figure it out! :P)
I've removed all YouTube videos from all posts (took hours yesterday) and will report back once we see a change after the next recrawl. We're also fetching as much as we can today (while still getting some work done).
Thanks for your help.
-
ViviCa1, yep, this is EXACTLY it. Thanks so much.
-
Hi yes that was me that posted the previous question. It does appear to be a bug, and Google has taken the date that the video was uploaded onto Youtube. Short term solution has been for us to remove the offending video and request a fetch, long term solution obviously is that Google needs to notice problem and fix it,
-
ViviCa1 - thanks for posting this link to the Q&A. It describes exactly the problem we're seeing.
Here's the link again for anyone else with the same problem:
https://moz.com/community/q/dates-appear-before-home-page-description-in-the-serps-huge-drop-in-rankings -
Hi, someone posted about this on Moz Q&A the other day and somebody else suggested it was to do with YouTube videos embedded on the affected pages. See this link.
-
Bernadette, thanks so much for your reply. As my suspicions were that it was perhaps a little bug on Google's part, it's nice to hear that you've noticed this as well.
I wonder if others have experienced this as well. Perhaps the latest mobile index has something to do with it.
-
smmour, we've actually noticed this as well, this past week. One site in particular that I'm familiar with shows a date from February 2012 on the site's home page even though the Google cache date shows that the page was cached just the other day.
Google typically does take the pub-date from a site and uses that typically, especially if it's in the code of a site using WordPress. However, what you're describing sounds more of a Google problem than a problem with your site in particular. Based on the fact that we've noticed this as well, this past week, it appears to be something that you haven't necessarily done.
What intrigues me is the fact that the domain name wasn't registered and the site wasn't live in 2010, the date that it is showing.
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
-
Google Showing wrong image in the SERPS
Hi Guys, In organic SERPS Google pulling incorrect product image, instead of product image its showing image from relevant products, Checked the structured data, og:image everything is set to the product image, not sure why google showing images from relevant product sidebar, any help, please?
Technical SEO | | SpartMoz0 -
Page content not being recognised?
I moved my website from Wix to Wordpress in May 2018. Since then, it's disappeared from Google searches. The site and pages are indexed, but no longer ranking. I've just started a Moz campaign, and most pages are being flagged as having "thin content" (50 words or less), when I know that there are 300+ words on most of the pages. Looking at the page source I find this bit of code: page contents Does this mean that Google is finding this and thinks that I have only two words (page contents) on the page? Or is this code to grab the page contents from somewhere else in the code? I'm completely lost with this and would appreciate any insight.
Technical SEO | | Photowife1 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Too Many Page Links
I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement. So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content. Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase. Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites. Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows. This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Seomoz pages error
Hi
Technical SEO | | looktouchfeel
I have a problem with seomoz, it is saying my website http://www.clearviewtraffic.com has page errors on 19,680 pages. Most of the errors are for duplicate page titles. The website itself doesn't even have 100 pages. Does anyone know how I can fix this? Thanks Luke0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Two different page authority ranks for the same page
I happened to notice that trophycentral.com and www.trophycentral.com have two different page ranks even though there is a 301 redirect. Should I be concerned? http://trophycentral.com Page Authority: 47 Domain Authority: 42 http://www.trophycentral.com Page Authority: 51 Domain Authority: 42 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them. I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0