May 14, 2021
Google SERPs Date Functionality
What is the best practice to follow? Should it have only one date set up or can be kept multiple (for instance - another related story date or a comment section date)? Or, should go with options for adding publish dates to Google results pages?
Really looking forward to understanding it. Thank you in advance.
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Hello Prag,
You can provide a publication date and/or a last updated date. We recommend providing dates in both user-visible formats on the page, and also in structured data.
- For a user-visible date: Show the page date prominently on the page itself. Label your dates appropriately. Here are examples of publication and update dates with date and optional time and timezone. (The exact wording shown here is not required.)
- Posted Feb 4, 2019
- Published February 4, 2019
- Last updated: Feb 14, 2018
- Updated Feb 14, 2019 8pm ET
- For structured data: Your page should implement a subtype of
CreativeWork(such asArticle,BlogPosting, orVideoObject), and specify thedatePublishedand/ordateModifiedfields (see guidelines for AMP and non-AMP pages). Be sure to follow Google's structured data guidelines to help our crawlers understand your article dates.
You can read more about dates in this article: Provide a publication date to Google Search
Hope this will help you
Product Expert Alumni Peter Nikolow recommended this
All Replies (2)
Hello Prag,
You can provide a publication date and/or a last updated date. We recommend providing dates in both user-visible formats on the page, and also in structured data.
- For a user-visible date: Show the page date prominently on the page itself. Label your dates appropriately. Here are examples of publication and update dates with date and optional time and timezone. (The exact wording shown here is not required.)
- Posted Feb 4, 2019
- Published February 4, 2019
- Last updated: Feb 14, 2018
- Updated Feb 14, 2019 8pm ET
- For structured data: Your page should implement a subtype of
CreativeWork(such asArticle,BlogPosting, orVideoObject), and specify thedatePublishedand/ordateModifiedfields (see guidelines for AMP and non-AMP pages). Be sure to follow Google's structured data guidelines to help our crawlers understand your article dates.
You can read more about dates in this article: Provide a publication date to Google Search
Hope this will help you
Product Expert Alumni Peter Nikolow recommended this
May 14, 2021
"Using structured data enables a feature to be present, it does not guarantee that it will be present. The Google algorithm tailors search results to create what it thinks is the best search experience for a user, depending on many variables, including search history, location, and device type. In some cases it may determine that one feature is more appropriate than another, or even that a plain blue link is best."
And example for Article:
there is field datePublished:
"The date and time the article was first published, in ISO 8601 format.
Best practices:
The date shouldn't change over time.
We recommend including the hour information in addition to the day in the timestamp.
The value for dateModified should be more recent than the value for datePublished."
and field dateModified.
But Google uses their own algos to show date in SERP.
Sometime it shows dataPublished, but based on different search query may display dataModified.
Peter