Google can show the wrong date in the search results snippets. We've covered this topic numerous times over multiple dates and times. But one aspect we did not cover is that when Google does this, it does not mean Google has quality issues with your website. It just means Google is not able to figure out the right date of that page.
So it is not like a core update or another ranking or quality algorithm is causing the date to be wrong. It is Google's systems for picking the right date for the page. Google said in the past, when Google gets the wrong date, it is often YOUR FAULT.
But it is not a site quality issue, as John Mueller of Google put it on Twitter it is not "a quality issue rather than a data-quality issue." A data quality issue refers to Google picking up the wrong data, or date, on the page based on it seeing conflicting date information. Google just sometimes gets it wrong.
Here are these tweets:
Lots of sites mess up with dates, sometimes we have to use what we see & know to figure it out. I don't see it as much a quality issue rather than a data-quality issue (you want us to guess? then we'll guess)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 12, 2021
With dates, we take all the date-information we have about a page, weigh them appropriately, and pick the one that's strongest. It's less a matter of "is it useful", it's more "if you want something (pick this date), then be accurate & not shy."
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 12, 2021
Perfectly fine, and it can help us to pick that date. FWIW sometimes differences are subtle, such as timezones (or lack of explicit timezone, meaning we have to infer one), or human-readable dates like "yesterday" (on a page we crawled a week ago).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 12, 2021
Here is what the date byline looks like:
In March 2019, Google's John Mueller wrote a long blog post named Help Google Search know the best date for your web page. So there are tips there to help Google pick the right date.
But as I said, Google has had their issues with showing the right dates in the snippets. Google even showed future dates in the snippets before and they know they have an issue as we said before. This snippet date thing is an ongoing issue for Google, we've covered it many times. In fact, sometimes it shows the impossible and sometimes people do trick Google but the signals Google uses for picking up dates is not perfect and it is an ongoing project for them.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
