Is it possible that Google may have erroneous indexing dates?

[SorinaDascalu]

I am consulting someone for a problem related to copied content. Both sites in question are WordPress (self hosted) sites. The "good" site publishes a post. The "bad" site copies the post (without even removing all internal links to the "good" site) a few days after.

On both websites it is obvious the publishing date of the posts, and it is clear that the "bad" site publishes the posts days later. The content thief doesn't even bother to fake the publishing date.

The owner of the "good" site wants to have all the proofs needed before acting against the content thief. So I suggested him to also check in Google the dates the various pages were indexed using Search Tools -> Custom Range in order to have the indexing date displayed next to the search results.

For all of the copied pages the indexing dates also prove the "bad" site published the content days after the "good" site, but there are 2 exceptions for the very 2 first posts copied.

First post:
On the "good" website it was published on 30 January 2013
On the "bad" website it was published on 26 February 2013
In Google search both show up indexed on 30 January 2013!

Second post:
On the "good" website it was published on 20 March 2013
On the "bad" website it was published on 10 May 2013
In Google search both show up indexed on 20 March 2013!

Is it possible to be an error in the date shown in Google search results?

I also asked for help on Google Webmaster forums but there the discussion shifted to "who copied the content" and "file a DMCA complain". So I want to be sure my question is better understood here.
It is not about who published the content first or how to take down the copied content, I am just asking if anybody else noticed this strange thing with Google indexing dates.

How is it possible for Google search results to display an indexing date previous to the date the article copy was published and exactly the same date that the original article was published and indexed?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Sorina,

This is a common thing and it all depends on a site's crawlability (how easy is it to crawl for the bot) and crawl frequency for that site. Google would have picked up that post first on the bad site and then from the good site. However, just because one or two posts were picked up late does not mean that the good site is not crawler friendly. It also depends on how far the resource is from the root. Let us take an example:

A page on a good site: abc.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/page.html

Now a bad site copies that page: xyz.com/page.html

In this case, Google might first pickup the copied page from the bad site as it is just a click away from the root which is not the case with the good site where the page is nested deep inside multiple folders.

You can also give the way back machine (archive.org) a try to find which website published the post first. Sometimes this might work out pretty well. You can also try to look at the cache dates of the posts on both the sites in Google to get some info in this regard.

Hope those help. I wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[SorinaDascalu]

Thank you for your response Devanur Rafi, but the "good" site doesn't have problems getting indexed. 
Actually all posts on the "good" site are indexed the very same day they are published.

My question was more about the indexing date shown in Google search results

How come, for a post from the "bad" site, Google is displaying an indexing date previous to the actual date the post was published on that site?!

And how come this date is exactly the same as the date Google says it indexed the post from the "good" site?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Sorina,

I can tell you that the index dates shown by Google are accurate but is not the case with the Cache date sometimes as the date shown in the Cache and the copy shown in the cache don't match many times but the index dates are accurate. Send me a private message with the actual URLs under discussion and I will be able to comment with more clarity.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[DougRoberts]

Hiya Sorina,

When you use the custom date range, Google isn't listing results based on the date they were indexed. Google is using an estimated publication date.

Google tries to estimate the the publication date based on meta-data and other features of the page such as dates in the content, title and URL. The date Google first indexed the page is just one of the things that Google can use to estimate the publication date.

I also suspect that dates in any sitemap.xml files will also be taken into consideration.

But, given that even Google can't guarantee that it'll crawl and index articles on the day they've been published the crawl data may not be an accurate estimate.

Also, if the scraped content is being re-published with intact internal links (are these the full URL - do you they resolve to your original website?) then it's pretty obvious where the content came from.

Hope this help answer your question.

[SorinaDascalu]

Thanks Doug for your response. It really cleared up the questions I had about that date Google shows next to the search results.

I was not able to find official details about it, all I was able to find was different referencing as the indexing date of a page.

But I knoew here in the MOZ community there are people who really know things, that's why I asked.

So that date is just Google's estimation of the publishing date, not the date Google indexed the content!

Thanks again for taking the time to answer me!

[Devanur-Rafi]

Thanks Doug. Really an eye-opener.