Removing wrong date from Snippet

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

On one of my client's websites Google is displaying the date as 13 March 2011. This makes the page look stale. Is there any way of removing this?

I have watched Matt Cutts video of this and I appreciate that Google lifts any date that it finds and puts it on the snippet but there is no date on this page and I have no idea where it came from.

[tedster]

These are some of the most frustrating Google errors - they used to happen a lot more often, but a few months back they did put some effort into fixing it and a lot of the errors went away.

I wish there were something simple and direct I could offer you now - but I know of nothing/ If you can find the source of that date, it would at least be a starting place.

[g1smd]

Look at the server headers using the Live HTTP Headers for Firefox extension, you'll likely see the "last modified" date mentioned there.

If you add the text "

Last Updated: 2012-03-14

" to the page and maybe also make a few small changes to the page, the date in the snippet will likely update.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Hi Ted, I looked all through the website in question and could find no trace of the date it had used. We did have an automatic date on there that was generated from a script but I am not sure that this was the problem. I have removed this now anyway.

It has used the same date on all the pages other than those that actually have a date mentioned in the content. These pages are indexed by the bot on different days so if it had been using the script date it would surely have changed it to that which it found when visiting?

Google seems to have arbitrarily decided to apply this random date to all these pages and I don't know where it got it. For the moment I have added a (current) hard date to the home page content to see if it will at least force it to change it to something more current.

.

[ohno]

Out of interest what date has it come up with? I had this & found others had the same date. I removed a sript that displayed the date & time on each page and the problem seems much reduced. Maybe coincidence mind!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Actually I made a mistake about the date. It actually displays 13 Jan 2011. I got it mixed up with yesterday's date, which is my wedding anniversary and hence burnt into my brain!

As I said earlier I have removed this script too so it looks like a waiting game now.

Look at the server headers

The "last modified" date is yesterday at 08:17, which is correct.

[ohno]

Same date as we had! Remove the JS and it does indeed now seem to be gone.

Google "13 Jan 2011 on webpage results"

Sorry, I missed you had put the date in the OP-doh!