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Yesterday I published an article on my website, if I go on Google it says that it has been published 3 days ago. Why?

I've WordPress, on a Centos 6,5 VM. System time is wrong of 20 min of my server, not 72 hours. WordPress displays the correct date.

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2015-06-12T18:42:08+00:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2015-06-12T19:28:28+00:00" />
<meta property="og:updated_time" content="2015-06-12T19:28:28+00:00" />
Stephen Ostermiller
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testermaster
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  • Are there any other dates that appear on the page? Sitemap? RSS feed? – MrWhite Jun 13 '15 at 09:36
  • Also: did you modify it by hand after publishing? – lucgenti Jun 13 '15 at 09:45
  • @w3d: nope, I've checked both rss and xml sitemap and date is correct... lucgenti no, I've modified the article only via wordpress panel – testermaster Jun 13 '15 at 10:23
  • @w3d edit: there are dates of older artilces in the sidebar, but I don't think that this is considered by google.... this is the format: <time itemprop="dateCreated" class="entry-date updated td-module-date" datetime="2015-06-10T15:30:40+00:00" >10/06/2015</time><meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserComments:1"/> – testermaster Jun 13 '15 at 10:26
  • Look here http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/18395/how-does-google-recognize-publish-date-of-a-post as you can see there's not only 1 parameter that tells google about a publishing date. – lucgenti Jun 13 '15 at 14:17
  • Anyway: do you use itemprop and other schema data in your article? If not, put it there and remove the schema data from the sidebar. – lucgenti Jun 13 '15 at 14:17
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    Check your system dates, both OS and hardware and the time zone to make sure there are no mistakes there. Generally speaking, dates only come from these as software can only query a date. It would be the first place I would look. – closetnoc Jun 13 '15 at 14:52
  • I would also look into the timezone/location setting of my google account if I'm logged in – simonthesorcerer Jun 15 '15 at 19:53

1 Answers1

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Google does not always include publication dates in snippet.

1) Sitemap:- Many of wordpress seo plugins, automatically ping to Google Webmaster Tools(GWT), so Googlebot fetch the dates from sitemap directly, it will not look out in your blog post dates.

2) Rss Feed:- If you submitted ATOM feed in GWT, then Google use that info to find out fresh content in your blog. If you did not submitted, Then Google can also fetch if you specified application tag into head tag. Mostly All wordpress include the MIME type into the head tag. So Google can also use that info sometimes.

example:-<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO &raquo; Feed" href="https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feed/" />

3) crawable link:- if your some off pages has high value, and you mention some of links on that page, then Googlebot directly index that linked page, and use your publication date(or any timestamp format) as a snippet.

4) Schema :- Google strongly use this format in snippet. Use Article or BlogPosting schema tags, just like you are using the Open graph protocol.

As per my suggestion, you should use schema (Article or BlogPosting) date tags. It is easiest way to control your dates snippet in the search result.

Arjunsinh Chauhan
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