SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages

[smmour]

Hi Moz friends,

I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd).

This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30.

As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance.

This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct.

The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic.

I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here.

Thank you in advance!

[becole]

smmour, we've actually noticed this as well, this past week. One site in particular that I'm familiar with shows a date from February 2012 on the site's home page even though the Google cache date shows that the page was cached just the other day.

Google typically does take the pub-date from a site and uses that typically, especially if it's in the code of a site using WordPress. However, what you're describing sounds more of a Google problem than a problem with your site in particular. Based on the fact that we've noticed this as well, this past week, it appears to be something that you haven't necessarily done.

What intrigues me is the fact that the domain name wasn't registered and the site wasn't live in 2010, the date that it is showing.

[smmour]

Bernadette, thanks so much for your reply. As my suspicions were that it was perhaps a little bug on Google's part, it's nice to hear that you've noticed this as well.

I wonder if others have experienced this as well. Perhaps the latest mobile index has something to do with it.

[ViviCa1]

Hi, someone posted about this on Moz Q&A the other day and somebody else suggested it was to do with YouTube videos embedded on the affected pages. See this link.

[IWTadmin]

ViviCa1 - thanks for posting this link to the Q&A. It describes exactly the problem we're seeing.

Here's the link again for anyone else with the same problem:
https://moz.com/community/q/dates-appear-before-home-page-description-in-the-serps-huge-drop-in-rankings

[GoUp]

Hi yes that was me that posted the previous question. It does appear to be a bug, and Google has taken the date that the video was uploaded onto Youtube. Short term solution has been for us to remove the offending video and request a fetch, long term solution obviously is that Google needs to notice problem and fix it,

[smmour]

ViviCa1, yep, this is EXACTLY it. Thanks so much.

[smmour]

Edward, it looks like both of us have experienced the same issue (as well as craze trying to figure it out! :P)

I've removed all YouTube videos from all posts (took hours yesterday) and will report back once we see a change after the next recrawl. We're also fetching as much as we can today (while still getting some work done).

Thanks for your help.

[ViviCa1]

It was mentioned yesterday on SE Roundtable, seems that Google are aware of it, see here.

[smmour]

It makes me feel a lot better this is a widespread thing. Hopefully it fixes soon! Unfortunately i've already removed all of my videos. Don't want to take a chance with this time of year.

[smmour]

Hi All,

Here's an update!

As of today, Wednesday November 16, all of our posts are now up-to-date since removing all embedded videos on Sunday, November 13. We started seeing about more than half fixed yesterday and the rest today. SERPs show the accurate date and traffic has gone back to normal. For one of our sites, we fetched in Google Search Console which took a day less; however, with the others, we waited to see how long it would take Google to naturally re-crawl and it took about 3-4 days.

I suggest removing all YouTube embedded videos (if that's a feasible task for you) to play it safe for now during the peak holiday season. We preferred to do this for our sites because we aren't sure when exactly Google plans on fixing this. All videos have been changed to direct links in the mean time. All has been fixed.

Hope it all works out for you guys and thanks for the help.

[ViviCa1]

Yeah, I'd do the same. Another option would be (if it is your video) to re-upload the video to YouTube, that way it gets a new very recent date.