Google Adds Dates to SERPS

If you have a blog, a forum or news site check this out.

You will see that Google is adding the date of the post as the first item in the snippet in the search engine results pages. At a guess this is for the freshness of the result for users but could be an issue for webmasters seeing a reduction in referals from Google.

If you have a post ranking highly that you wrote some years ago a date of 2005 appearing in SERPS will undoubtedly put users off clicking on your link as it looks old and out of date.

So what can you do?

One way is to take out the date of your post in the actual page of the post itself. For a blog page this isn’t such a big deal and you can easily edit Wordpress etc. For forums you might not want to edit the date or perhaps you can do something else with the dates of posts.

Do a search for your industry and see what happens - this is a big change.