When Google can determine the publication and update dates of your page or video, it can expose this information in Search results, if this information is considered to be useful to the user. You can provide information to help Google determine the publication and last updated date.
Google doesn’t depend on a single dating factor because all factors can be prone to issues. That’s why our systems look at several factors to determine our best estimate of when a page was published or significantly updated.
How to provide date information to Google
To provide date information to Google, follow these steps:
- Follow the guidelines.
- Add a user-visible date to the page and feature it prominently. Label your dates appropriately with text like “Publish” or “Last updated”. Here are some examples of publication and update dates:
- Posted Feb 4, 2019
- Published February 4, 2019
- Last updated: Feb 14, 2018
- Updated Feb 14, 2019 8pm ET
<head>
<title>Analyzing Google Search traffic drops</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2021
</p>
<p>
Suppose you open Search Console and find out that your Google Search traffic dropped. What should you do?
</p>
</body>
</html> - Specify dates with structured data. We recommend that you add a subtype of
CreativeWork(such asArticle,BlogPosting, orVideoObject), and specify thedatePublishedand/ordateModifiedfields. Be sure to follow Google’s structured data guidelines to help our crawlers understand your article dates.<html>
<head>
<title>Analyzing Google Search traffic drops</title>
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “NewsArticle”,
“headline”: “Analyzing Google Search traffic drops”,
“datePublished”: “2021-07-20T08:00:00+08:00”,
“dateModified”: “2021-07-20T09:20:00+08:00”
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<p>
Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2021
</p>
<p>
Suppose you open Search Console and find out that your Google Search traffic dropped. What should you do?
</p>
</body>
</html>
Guidelines
While Google doesn’t guarantee that a date, whether visible or in structured data, will be shown in search results, following these guidelines does help our algorithms find and process the information.
- The date is required; the time is not: The time portion is optional in both user-visible and structured data dates.
- If you choose to specify a time, provide the correct timezone, taking into account daylight saving time as appropriate.
- Make your dates and times consistent. Ensure that the date (and optional time and time zone) match between the equivalent user-visible and structured values. Time and time zone are optional in user-visible data even if provided in structured data.
- Don’t specify future dates, or the date of the action described on the page. The dates must describe the publication or update date of the page, not the stories or events described therein. You can add Event markup to the page to describe the activities listed on the page, if you like.
- Minimize the presence of other dates on the page: If you’ve followed the best practices and find incorrect dates are being selected, consider removing some or all other dates that appear on the page.
- If your page is intended to show up in Google News search, follow these additional guidelines.
