SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
-
Hi Moz friends,
I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd).
This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30.
As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance.
This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct.
The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic.
I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here.
Thank you in advance!
-
Yeah, I'd do the same. Another option would be (if it is your video) to re-upload the video to YouTube, that way it gets a new very recent date.
-
Hi All,
Here's an update!
As of today, Wednesday November 16, all of our posts are now up-to-date since removing all embedded videos on Sunday, November 13. We started seeing about more than half fixed yesterday and the rest today. SERPs show the accurate date and traffic has gone back to normal. For one of our sites, we fetched in Google Search Console which took a day less; however, with the others, we waited to see how long it would take Google to naturally re-crawl and it took about 3-4 days.
I suggest removing all YouTube embedded videos (if that's a feasible task for you) to play it safe for now during the peak holiday season. We preferred to do this for our sites because we aren't sure when exactly Google plans on fixing this. All videos have been changed to direct links in the mean time. All has been fixed.
Hope it all works out for you guys and thanks for the help.
-
It makes me feel a lot better this is a widespread thing. Hopefully it fixes soon! Unfortunately i've already removed all of my videos. Don't want to take a chance with this time of year.
-
It was mentioned yesterday on SE Roundtable, seems that Google are aware of it, see here.
-
Edward, it looks like both of us have experienced the same issue (as well as craze trying to figure it out! :P)
I've removed all YouTube videos from all posts (took hours yesterday) and will report back once we see a change after the next recrawl. We're also fetching as much as we can today (while still getting some work done).
Thanks for your help.
-
ViviCa1, yep, this is EXACTLY it. Thanks so much.
-
Hi yes that was me that posted the previous question. It does appear to be a bug, and Google has taken the date that the video was uploaded onto Youtube. Short term solution has been for us to remove the offending video and request a fetch, long term solution obviously is that Google needs to notice problem and fix it,
-
ViviCa1 - thanks for posting this link to the Q&A. It describes exactly the problem we're seeing.
Here's the link again for anyone else with the same problem:
https://moz.com/community/q/dates-appear-before-home-page-description-in-the-serps-huge-drop-in-rankings -
Hi, someone posted about this on Moz Q&A the other day and somebody else suggested it was to do with YouTube videos embedded on the affected pages. See this link.
-
Bernadette, thanks so much for your reply. As my suspicions were that it was perhaps a little bug on Google's part, it's nice to hear that you've noticed this as well.
I wonder if others have experienced this as well. Perhaps the latest mobile index has something to do with it.
-
smmour, we've actually noticed this as well, this past week. One site in particular that I'm familiar with shows a date from February 2012 on the site's home page even though the Google cache date shows that the page was cached just the other day.
Google typically does take the pub-date from a site and uses that typically, especially if it's in the code of a site using WordPress. However, what you're describing sounds more of a Google problem than a problem with your site in particular. Based on the fact that we've noticed this as well, this past week, it appears to be something that you haven't necessarily done.
What intrigues me is the fact that the domain name wasn't registered and the site wasn't live in 2010, the date that it is showing.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate page titles for blog snippets pages
I can't figure the answer to this issue, on my blog I have a number of pages which each show snippets and an image for each blog entry, these are called /recent-weddings/page/1 /2 /3 and so on. I'm getting duplicate page titles for these but can't find anywhere on Wordpress to set a unique title for them. So http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/2/ has the same title as http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/3/
Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto0 -
Odd 404 pages
Evening all, I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s: http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists? Would you leave them as is? 410 them? Or do something else entirely? Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Kind regards, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Auto generated pages
Hi, I have two sites showing (crawl report from SEOMoz.org) extremely high numbers of duplicate titles and descriptions (e.g., 33,000). These sites have CMSs behind them and so the duplicate titles, etc., are a result of auto-generated pages. What is the best way to address these problems? Thanks! David
Technical SEO | | DWill0 -
How do I know my SERP
Is there a tool to tell me my exact SERP? I am trying to find a company on google. I have looked through hundreds of pages. Is there a tool to tell me exactly where it is currently ranked for a particular keyword?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Where Do I Start?
Each time google comes out with an update (panda, penguin) my site suffers heavily so I decided to take over my seo for my website after years of paying seo professionals, who basically never met my expectations. After runnin ga crawl Diagnostics I see that I have; 4,718 Duplicate Page Titles 1,902 Duplicate Page Content 3,469 Temporary Redirect I have no idea how to fix these issues. The 4,718 Duplicate Page Titles are hard to fix because i run a dating site and I have a lot of members who create profile so their page title is usually (members userame & Phone Dating) but i guess google considers this dupliacte page title but its not b/c the username should always be different. The 3,469 Temporary Redirect is b/c whenever a guess tries to go to a page on the site that requires them to login I use a 302 redirect to send them to the user registration page. Do i try to fix these issues or just move on to building links and adding content?
Technical SEO | | LLP0 -
Should i Change On Page Optimization ?
Hi, PC monitoring and computer monitoring software are our targeted keywords. Around 5 weeks ago, We created a page for pc monitoring software (home/pc-monitoring-software) and did some bookmarking and guest posts targeting PC monitoring software keyword. Now we are in Top 15 on Google for PC monitoring software keyword . Initially we were thinking to change content of around 2 year old home page to adjust computer monitoring software keyword and do SEO for this keyword. But few days ago, we noticed that our pc-monitoring-software page is already ranking in early fourties for computer monitoring software keyword as well. May be Google is giving advatage of being synonym of PC . Now we are thinking that we should optimize the PC monitoring software page for both computer and PC software keywords like adding "computer monitoring software" in addition to existing "pc monitoring software" in title and similalrly do other on page related work for Computer Mnitoring Software. We are also thinking of doing 301 redirect of existing pc-monitoring-software page to new computer-monitoring-software page which will be optimized both for PC and Computer. Please suggest me if it will help to get good ranking for both PC and Computer Monitoring software if we make above mentioned changes or we should not change the existing pc-monitoring-software page and shall stick to earlier plan of changing the home page to adjust for computer monitoring software.? I'm new to SEO, so want to make wise decision with your help instead of learning with failures. Thanks, shahzad
Technical SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0