Dates in urls returned in serps

some have them... some don't

[travelin cat]

I have noticed that the last line in the serps on some of our results in Google look like this:

www.oursite.com/ - 97k - Oct 10, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

while other times the date is omitted. Many of the other results do not show the date, even the ones listed in front of us.

I thought this may be the cached date, but typically the cached date is 1 or 2 days previous to the date displayed.

So this begs the question.. what does the date represent? and why does it show up occasionally for some and not others?

[netmeg]

I thought it was if you were logged into your Google account at the time, that's the last time they figured you visited that URL. Just a guess.

[travelin cat]

netmeg,

I don't think so... there are other sites unrelated to mine that occasionally display dates.

[ALbino]

Do a search for Freshbot. Although I'm not sure if that's as relevant as it once was.

[travelin cat]

ALbino,

Interesting. Seems like this is a good thing as they see our content changing regularly (which it does) and are therefore spidering it more often. At least that's what I got out of the references I found...

[g1smd]

The difference in date is that the date in the line in the SERPs is based on Google's time zone, whilst the date in the Cache is based on UTC.

So, when a page is cached at 2006-10-11 @ 04:00 UTC, it is still 2006-10-10 @ 20:00 Mountain Time where Google HQ is. So the fresh date in the SERPs will show the 10th.

Additionally, you often see a new Fresh Date appear when Google spidered the site again, but the cache date might not change if the content they found on the page had not changed from the last time it was looked at.

I have seen times with todays date as a fresh date, paired with a cache date that was days or weeks old.

Matt Cutts hints (weeks and weeks ago) that this functionality is changing now that Google makes more use of If-Modified-Since logic and the cache date might update each time the spider comes round, not each time they download the full page again.