Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:08:11 by Kerry Dye
I've been investigating the appearance of date information in the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Although this phenomenon has been around since March, it seems to be applied inconsistently.
The dates feature is applied to blog content, and cleverly gives you the dates in your local date format. It also doesn't change the length of the meta description, instead adding the date as "extra" characters. However, it doesn't seem to pick the date up for all blog content.
I've had a dig around, with some guesses as to what might cause the differences, which included:
• Type of blog software (Wordpress/Blogger/other)
• CSS Class/ID of the date field
• Date in the URL
For the Scobleizer example I've given above, it actually appears to be straightforward - the actual blog pages don't have the date anywhere on the page. But Matt Cutt's blog doesn't have a date, despite it being on the page under the blog title.
So it isn't quite that simple. None of the other factors I looked at had a bearing on whether they appeared or not. The other reason it might not appear is that the date doesn't appear if the blog was published today.
So it looks like the date is generally inserted by analysing the page content and pattern matching date formats. But it doesn't always work quite right.
So if you have built a company blog to assist with your SEO, the chances are that the date will appear, and if it doesn't experiment with making the date more "obvious" in the HTML code.
Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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