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Saturday, Sep. 25, 2021

Are Google search result time stamps the exact publication dates of web pages?

Christiana Dillard, Lead Stories
no

If you think Google is pretty close to infallible, seeing a web page that seems to predict an event can appear eerie.

Google says, however, that it can only estimate the date that a web page was created.

According to its blog post, "Google doesn't depend on one single factor because all of them can be prone to issues. Publishers may not always provide a clear visible date. Sometimes, structured data may be lacking or may not be adjusted to the correct time zone."

The senior webmaster trends analyst at Google said in a video, "We use multiple factors to try to figure out which dates are relevant for a page. So it's not just the metadata on the page, but we try to figure out has there actually been a significant change on the page."

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

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