In article <8d6444cb56....@6.abbeypress.net>, Jim Nagel <nets...@abbeypress.co.uk> wrote: > What causes Google (or other searchers) to display (or not display) a > DATE in search results?
> For instance, search for "Terran site:iconbar.com" -- some of the > items listed show a date and some don't. Those with a date seem to have it in the page following the word "updated" as many news stories do elsewhere. I can't say that would be of much use to many of my pages, but gives me an idea. > If I ran the world, *every* item would show a date. So often one > wants current information, not waste time on stuff from 2001. But > sometimes historical stuff is indeed what is sought. A pity there is no standard for a document's date or last revision date, isn't it? We should be using something like a meta tag with name 'published' or 'revised'; perhaps 'updated'. But whatever you use, it needs to appear in the body of a page for a search engine to take notice. Unfortunately, the way these dates are grabbed off a page are not particularly useful in some circumstances. > So state date. I've long wondered what the mechanism is. A search result dates this page as 25th July 1982, showing that the date is grabbed off the page without intelligence: it demonstrates only that such dates are not particularly useful. www.youngtheatre.co.uk/archive/harrow/productions.php There are different publication and build dates in the meta tags which tells me I need to look into this more, thanks for bringing it up. I'm going to add "updated: [date]" to my RISC OS page(s) which are currently undergoing a re-vamp.....Done. (~24 pages changed with one edit to read and 'print' the last modification date of the relevant part of the page. Got to love PHP.) -- Tim Hill timil.com : tjrh.eu : butterwick.eu : blue-bike.uk : youngtheatre.co.uk
