How Google is Reverse Engineering Page Dates

http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/uploads/google-date-posts.jpg

In recent weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in Google SERP’s: Google has become much more aggressive at trying to reverse engineer the publication date of a post/page.First let’s be clear about what we’re discussing. In some cases, when you do a search, Google will show a date in the listing. See the example below:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/uploads/date-example.jpg

Initially, Google only looked at the date that was near the H1/Title of the page and, if it found something, it used that as the date in the SERP’s. This was fairly easy to override: when a post hit a certain age you could “remove” the date with a date based trigger and the date would disappear from the SERP’s. Now, however, Google has gotten a lot more aggressive in trying to assign a date to a page/post. Here are some methods I’ve seen them use:

• Full format dates inside the main content of pages (month/day/year)
• Dates in the comments, when no other date appears on a page
• Decoding dates in URL’s (I have seen them decode 20091225 and 12252009 formats)

I have a few sites in which I use date format URL’s; at this point, I am giving very serious consideration to changing that procedure. In fact, I’m testing as we speak. Issuing a massive sitewide 301 is a dangerous thing and not something I’d recommend for everyone. That said, if you like to roll the dice and are on Wordpress, give Dean’s Permalink Migration plugin a try. It makes the whole process pretty painless.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/plugins/photo-dropper/images/cc.png photo credit: dierkenAdvertisement: Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services . #7

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. How Google is Reverse Engineering Page Dates

http://www.wolf-howl.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=5334&type=feedRelated posts:

1. Wondering Why I see So Many Dates in The SERPS Here’s a screen shot of a Google search I did...
2. Gone Supplemental and Really Old Cache Dates Went to look into breathing new life into a site...
3. Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs While wordpress is one of my favorite CMS platforms, out...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=d05RWl1JSC4:oLNyJoOJxec:V_sGLiPBpWU</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=d05RWl1JSC4:oLNyJoOJxec:wF9xT3WuBAs</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=dnMXMwOfBR0</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=d05RWl1JSC4:oLNyJoOJxec:aKCwKftKxY0</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=7Q72WNTAKBA</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=d05RWl1JSC4:oLNyJoOJxec:D7DqB2pKExk</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=d05RWl1JSC4:oLNyJoOJxec:JEwB19i1-c4</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=yIl2AUoC8zA</img>http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~4/d05RWl1JSC4

View the full article