Wondering Why I see So Many Dates in The SERPS
Posted on September 18th, 2008by Michael Gray in Google
Here’s a screen shot of a Google search I did earlier today, made me wonder why Google thought it was important to include the date so many times
It’s even more odd considering the issues they’ve been having with getting dates right in Google news
Popularity: 10% [?]
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September 18th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Such a waste of SERP real estate. Google usually does that for blogs or CMS-heavy websites. Don’t know why they keep the date though.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Try this http://www.google.com/search?q=us+airways+inflight+wifi&as_qdr=d
September 20th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Michael, have you found out why that is? I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Not sure but one might think it could be the date of the latest post on the site that was cached, and puts it on each article posted within a certain date range.(JUST ASSUMING)
September 25th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
It’s because those pages are articles or posts with dates while the the ones with no dates are just websites with relevant content.
September 25th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Actually, I had to go back and look again. Some articles with the dates even in the url’s didn’t even show the date in the listing description. Yeah, that is weird.
September 28th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I’ve seen the same thing with posts from my blog. The dates are the date of the post. I’m not sure why Google considers them important.
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Weird, I can’t tell what makes a site get a date with its search result. Looking into the source of the sites in the results, I can tell that it’s not:
* Using microformats
* Table-layouts vs CSS layouts
* Blog/CMS software
It might be:
* Using RFC 1123 formatted dates
* Not having a lot of dates on the page
Interesting find!
October 10th, 2008 at 2:34 am
[...] Michael Gray has spotted this as well. (Note: this differs from the visits that are recorded by Google if you’re logged in.) [...]
October 10th, 2008 at 3:39 am
[...] Michael Gray has spotted this as well. [...]