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Home > eCommerce Digital Marketing Blog > SEO > On-Page SEO > Got Dates In Your Google SERP Description?

Got Dates In Your Google SERP Description?

Posted By Mike Belasco on October 20, 2009

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If a date is appearing at the beginning of your site’s description on a Google search results page, there is a probably a good reason why. Some site sites want these dates to appear such as blog posts, news sites, forums, etc., because the dates help the users to determine how relevant the information behind the link might be.  In other cases Google has for one reason or another determined the results page would be enhanced by adding a date to the description, but for the site owner it can seem more than irrelevant.

We recently had a situation where an eCommerce client of ours starting having dates appear at the beginning of their description on Google search result pages after a site redesign. After much research we determined that links to certain RSS feeds from the homepage (which were added during the re-design), might be the culprit. The feeds were for content such as new customer reviews, new products, etc and were updated each day. The dates we were noticing in the descriptions seemed to change all they time and stayed fairly recent. We remove the links to the RSS feeds and viola, no more dates in the Google descriptions!

There are probably many other places Google could grab a date to associate with the description such as the Last-Modified variable in the header, other dates included in your content, dates in the URLs of blog posts, and many others I am not thinking of right now.

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5 Comments on "Got Dates In Your Google SERP Description?"
  1. Everett says:
    October 20, 2009 at

    Curious to know if nofollowing the links to the RSS feeds would have had the same effect without actually having to remove them.

    Reply
    • admin says:
      October 20, 2009 at

      not sure but we really didn’t need links to the several feeds that were present. They were there to ‘play’ with more than anything.

      Reply
  2. Dave says:
    December 11, 2009 at

    It’s ‘voila’, not ‘walla’

    Reply
  3. Geek Blogger says:
    February 7, 2010 at

    Do you know how to remove the date from serp’s for blogspot posts

    Reply
  4. shesek says:
    May 16, 2010 at

    Hey,
    I’m having the same issue and didn’t quite understand if you meant an actual link (an anchor, “a” tag) or the link tag in the page head?

    Reply

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Mike Belasco

Mike Belasco has been an entrepreneur and digital marketer since 2003. He’s been the CEO of Inflow (founded as seOverflow) since 2007 and has led Inflow to five Denver’s Fastest-Growing Private Company awards and three Inc. 5000 awards. In 2009, he also founded ConversionIQ, which was acquired by Inflow in 2014.

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