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
-
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
Very wierd pages. 2900 403 errors in page crawl for a site that only has 140 pages.
Hi there, I just made a crawl of the website of one of my clients with the crawl tool from moz. I have 2900 403 errors and there is only 140 pages on the website. I will give an exemple of what the crawl error gives me. | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | | | | | | | | | | There are 2900 pages like this. I have tried visiting the pages and they work, but they are only html pages without CSS. Can you guys help me to see what the problems is. We have experienced huge drops in traffic since Septembre.
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Top Landing Page has disappeared from Google Search Console but still shows at the top of Google
Hi, One of the top landing pages in my website has disappeared from GSC Search Analytics results. But I do get a good traffic from that page until now. What might be the reason for GSC to stop showing it on the results?
Technical SEO | | eduapps0 -
What will happen if all our website content has the date created amended to the migration date?
HI, We will be migrating all our website content soon to a new CMS and at the moment the
Technical SEO | | alzheimerssoc1 -
Results Pages Duplication - What to do?
Hi all, I run a large, well established hotel site which fills a specific niche. Last February we went through a redesign which implemented pagination and lots of PHP / SQL wizzardy. This has left us, however, with a bit of a duplication problem which I'll try my best to explain! Imagine Hotel 1 has a pool, as well as a hot tub. This means that Hotel 1 will be in the search results of both 'Hotels with Pools' and 'Hotels with Hot Tubs', with exactly the same copy, affiliate link and thumbnail picture in the search results. Now imagine this issue occurring hundreds of times across the site and you have our problem, especially since this is a Panda-hit site. We've tried to keep any duplicate content away from our landing pages with some success but it's just all those pesky PHP paginated pages which doing us in (e.g. Hotels/Page-2/?classifications[]263=73491&classifcations[]742=24742 and so on) I'm thinking that we should either a) completely noindex all of the PHP search results or b) move us over to a Javascript platform. Which would you guys recommend? Or is there another solution which I'm overlooking? Any help most appreciated!
Technical SEO | | dooberry0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Tool which checks cache date of pages?
Does anyone know of a tool which can check the cache date of each page of a site? i can get each page of the site into a .csv or xml file
Technical SEO | | Turkey1