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Show published and updated dates

rule · content-dates

Showing when content was published and last updated is a trust signal for readers and a freshness signal for search engines. Google's Article structured data guidance (opens in a new tab) and your broader freshness signal strategy both depend on these dates being visible and machine-readable.

Code Examples

❌ Avoid — no date markup

HTML
<article>
  <h1>How to Optimise Core Web Vitals</h1>
  <p>Last updated March 2024</p>
  <!-- No machine-readable date; Google cannot reliably parse this -->
</article>

✅ Correct — visible date with machine-readable markup

HTML
<article>
  <h1>How to Optimise Core Web Vitals</h1>
  <p>Published <time datetime="2024-03-15">March 15, 2024</time>
     · Updated <time datetime="2024-11-20">November 20, 2024</time></p>
</article>

✅ Article JSON-LD with dates

HTML
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "How to Optimise Core Web Vitals",
  "datePublished": "2024-03-15T10:00:00Z",
  "dateModified": "2024-11-20T14:30:00Z",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Smith" }
}
</script>

✅ Open Graph article times in <head>

HTML
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2024-03-15T10:00:00Z">
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2024-11-20T14:30:00Z">

Why It Matters

  • Freshness ranking: Google rewards fresh content for time-sensitive queries. Accurate dateModified helps Google assess how current your content is, especially when it matches the same freshness signals surfaced in Schema.org's dateModified (opens in a new tab).
  • Snippet dates: Google shows publication dates next to search results. Without structured markup, it guesses from page text — often incorrectly.
  • User trust: Readers evaluate whether information is current before clicking. A visible date reduces bounce rate from people who find content too old.

What to Check

For every article, blog post, or news page, verify:

  1. A visible <time> element with a datetime attribute in the byline
  2. datePublished and dateModified in the page's Article JSON-LD
  3. Optional but helpful: Open Graph article:published_time and article:modified_time

How to Fix Missing Dates

  1. Identify all article and blog pages that lack a visible or structured date.
  2. Add a <time datetime="..."> element to each article template.
  3. Update your Article JSON-LD template to include datePublished and dateModified.
  4. Ensure your CMS stores and exposes both dates, and that dateModified updates on substantive edits.
  5. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test (opens in a new tab).

Exceptions

  • Necessary utility or compliance pages can be intentionally brief and should not be judged by the same editorial-depth expectations as ranking-focused content.
  • AI-assisted drafting is not a failure by itself; flag unsupported claims, missing editorial review, or low-originality output instead.
  • When a page has both trust-signal issues and crawl/index problems, make the page eligible to rank first and then improve the content quality signals.

Standards

  • Use these references as the standard for the final search-facing HTML, metadata, and crawl behavior.
  • Check the implementation against Google Search Central: Article structured data before treating the rule as satisfied.
  • Check the implementation against Schema.org: dateModified before treating the rule as satisfied.

Verification

Automated Checks

  • Inspect rendered HTML and HTTP headers to confirm the expected metadata or crawlability signal is present.
  • Test the affected URL with Google Search Console or equivalent tooling where relevant.
  • Re-crawl a representative page set after deployment.

Manual Checks

  • Confirm the change does not create conflicting canonical-url, robots, or structured-data signals.