Published and Modified Dates
Stating accurate publication and substantive revision dates in the visible page, the response headers, the sitemap, and the structured data.
Analogy Mental model
The date stamp on a chilled meat package. A buyer preparing dinner walks past the three-year-old packet and takes the one dated this morning.
In practice What you actually do
These engines weight recency heavily, so a genuine revision deserves four consistent signals: the visible updated line, the modified date in the markup, a year reference inside the body, and a push notification to the index. All four should change together or none should.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
A script that refreshes the visible date daily while the content stays identical is detected quickly by comparing content, and the consequence is that every date signal on the domain stops being believed.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →