Date

Yandex can display a publication date in the snippet, which for news and blog content tells the reader whether the information is current — often deciding the click before the title does.

Two ways to supply it

• In the URL, using a date pattern: /yyyy/mm/dd/ o /yyyy-mm-dd/.
• The meta tag article:published_time, in ISO 8601 format:
  <meta name="article:published_time" content="2023-10-07T00:00:00+03:00"/>

Both can be used together, and the robot extracts the date during indexing.

Which to choose

The meta tag, in almost every case. Dates in URLs commit the site to an information architecture that ages badly: an article updated substantially three years later still carries its original date in its address, and changing it means a redirect. The meta tag carries the same information without constraining the URL.

Where a date-based URL scheme already exists, there is no reason to abandon it — but adding the meta tag alongside is free and makes the date explicit rather than inferred.

Where a date helps and where it hurts

It helps for news, blog posts, releases and anything a reader would reasonably check for currency. It hurts on evergreen content: a genuinely useful guide from four years ago shows its age in the result and loses clicks to something newer and worse. The absence of a date is a legitimate choice for reference material.

The obligation it creates

A displayed date is a promise. Publishing it and then leaving the article untouched for three years is worse than publishing nothing — and updating the date without updating the content is precisely the kind of manipulation the low-value content rules describe. If dates are shown, the editorial process has to keep them true.