Thanks Doug for your response. It really cleared up the questions I had about that date Google shows next to the search results.

I was not able to find official details about it, all I was able to find was different referencing as the indexing date of a page.

But I knoew here in the MOZ community there are people who really know things, that's why I asked.

So that date is just Google's estimation of the publishing date, not the date Google indexed the content!

Thanks again for taking the time to answer me!

Thank you for your response Devanur Rafi, but the "good" site doesn't have problems getting indexed. 
Actually all posts on the "good" site are indexed the very same day they are published.

My question was more about the indexing date shown in Google search results

How come, for a post from the "bad" site, Google is displaying an indexing date previous to the actual date the post was published on that site?!

And how come this date is exactly the same as the date Google says it indexed the post from the "good" site?

I am consulting someone for a problem related to copied content. Both sites in question are WordPress (self hosted) sites. The "good" site publishes a post. The "bad" site copies the post (without even removing all internal links to the "good" site) a few days after.

On both websites it is obvious the publishing date of the posts, and it is clear that the "bad" site publishes the posts days later. The content thief doesn't even bother to fake the publishing date.

The owner of the "good" site wants to have all the proofs needed before acting against the content thief. So I suggested him to also check in Google the dates the various pages were indexed using Search Tools -> Custom Range in order to have the indexing date displayed next to the search results.

For all of the copied pages the indexing dates also prove the "bad" site published the content days after the "good" site, but there are 2 exceptions for the very 2 first posts copied.

First post:
On the "good" website it was published on 30 January 2013
On the "bad" website it was published on 26 February 2013
In Google search both show up indexed on 30 January 2013!

Second post:
On the "good" website it was published on 20 March 2013
On the "bad" website it was published on 10 May 2013
In Google search both show up indexed on 20 March 2013!

Is it possible to be an error in the date shown in Google search results?

I also asked for help on Google Webmaster forums but there the discussion shifted to "who copied the content" and "file a DMCA complain". So I want to be sure my question is better understood here.
It is not about who published the content first or how to take down the copied content, I am just asking if anybody else noticed this strange thing with Google indexing dates.

How is it possible for Google search results to display an indexing date previous to the date the article copy was published and exactly the same date that the original article was published and indexed?

As I said, you can add reference to your sitemaps in the robots.txt file:

At the end of the file http://www.thesalebox.com/robots.txt add the following lines:

sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml
sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xml

I doubt that using different anchor texts for the same image will have a negative impact on SEO.
After all, a picture is worth 1000 words and since we can't put all 1000 in the alt attribute at the same time, we can put them in smaller groups

Not to forget, that technically even if your image source is the same, what you display can be totally different via CSS so Google can't blame you for using different anchor texts.

Here is a quote from Google's Webmasters Help:

In some cases, the image URL may not be on the same domain as your main site. This is fine, as long as both domains are verified in Webmaster Tools. If, for example, you use a content delivery network (CDN) to host your images, make sure that the hosting site is verified in Webmaster Tools OR that you submit your Sitemap using robots.txt. In addition, make sure that your robots.txt file doesn’t disallow the crawling of any content you want indexed.

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636

According to the above, now that you have also verified the subdomain where you are hosting your images you should be fine.

You don't have to submit the sitemap to the GWT account of the subdomain where you host your images, but you may add reference to your sitemaps in the robots.txt located in the root folder of your website, by adding something like this to the robots.txt file:

sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml
sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xml

Yes, if your images are on a CDN server you must add to GWT that subdomain too  in order to be able to see if the images are indexed by Google or not.

Hi,

I noticed your images are all hosted on a subdomain, http://pics.thesalebox.com. Did you added this subdomain to Google Webmaster Tools?

The rel="canonical" was introduced to avoid duplicate content issues. It has nothing to do with links, internal or external.
 You use rel="canonical" to tell search engines which version of a page you prefer to be indexed.

If you prefer to tell nothing, or if there is no way a page may get indexed with a different URL then you don't need to use rel="canonical".

You are saying that your page has no external links pointing to it - but how can you control that? I may find your page, like it and link to it! This is how backlinks are supposed to work.

As you probably know each url can we written in different ways and still point to the same content. What if you prefer your page to be indexed as http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage and I instead link to http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage/ (note the ending /)? In these cases using rel="canonical" may help not losing any link juice.

I hope this helps.

Your unjustified enthusiasm for being included in a directory with such a poor design make me think that maybe you created this directory yourself and are just trying to promote it here... because I find it had to believe that Amazon, Google, Paypal payed money to be included there.

But I hope that is not the case and my answer to your question is: my small company chooses to list its contact details on the website and other places where it can be easily found by our clients, not by telemarketers like EGOL correctly pointed out.

For websites that have their content not publicly available there is a solution from Google to index it, is called "First Click Free" and consists on providing to the visitors that arrived to your site via Google search the entire piece of content ranked in the search  results for free.

In Google Support they explain it better and in more detail, so you should read this: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 and also the technical requirements.

Irving,

I personally saw this happen on a website - it was hacked, but no malware was placed on it. So the browser message  "this website may harm your computer" was not showing up, and no massage was displayed in WMT under Malware.

These are some blackhat SEO hacks, where they alter the content of a website and place links to porn/gambling without the intention to get the website flagged for malware. The hackers just want to get good links to their shallow websites, not to knock these websites out of Google.