Date next to entry in SERPS

Why do some have them, some not?

[AnonyMouse]

I think the title of the thread says it all! But to be more verbose: in the SERPS, some entries have a date after the URL, and before the "cached" link. What is this date, and why don't all SERP entries have one?

[jtbell]

some entries have a date after the URL

That's a "fresh date." It's supposed to mean that those entries are either new or updated recently. However, it's not always reliable. Sometimes one of my old pages gets a "fresh date" even though I haven't touched it in months.

[phpdude]

Actually,

The date is the last time it was indexed. Whether or not anything changed on the page between spiders has nothing to do with it.

[GoogleGuy]

I think it's actually the crawl date. If we just freshly crawled a page, we go ahead and let users know that. But you're right that it doesn't mean the page has been updated recently--it just means that we have a pretty fresh copy of the page.

[AnonyMouse]

Wow, I am honoured, a reply from the big GG him/herself!

So, it is the crawl date, that's confirmed. But why don't all the entries have a date? Is there a cut-off date, where the data is no longer regarded as "fresh" and therefore not worthy of a datestamp?

[Visit Thailand]

If you have the nocache tag on your page you don't get a date no matter how frequently the page updates.

[g1smd]

I still get fresh dates on a page that hasn't changed content since some time in 1997.

It just indicates that the copy that Google has, was only recently obtained from the site itelf.

[SyntheticUpper]

big GG him/herself!

I've had a few run-ins with GG recently, and I hope he/she forgives me. But I think his/her name, er, GoogleGuy may give some small clue as to his/her sex.

On this evidence I always assumed GG was male.

Call me crazy!

(But there again, I'm not from California :)

[metrostang]

Googleguy - A related question about dates.

Why is some cases do pages appear that are in fact updated pages with fresh dates (crawl date) and then in the next couple of days revert to a previous version?

I've seen this several times recently with specific pages from my site.

[GoogleGuy]

Hey AnonyMouse, I think if we crawled the page within the last 1-3 days or so, we sometimes go ahead and highlight that by showing the crawl date.

SyntheticUpper, no worries. :) I picked the name GoogleGuy after a few minutes of thinking. I probably could have thought about it for a few more minutes. :) AdWordsAdvisor and AdSenseAdvisor were smart enough to pick a nickname that's a little more general. I like using the GoogleGuy nickname instead of my name because some day I might want to take a vacation or let somebody else take over being GoogleGuy for a while.

[GoogleGuy]

metrostang, we have a daily crawl of several million pages each day. My hunch is that some pages are showing up in the daily crawl for a few days, and then happen not to be in the daily crawl. I don't think that pages from our daily crawl automatically feed into our larger index. Does that make sense?

I could maybe try to explain it some other way. Imagine that you've got a fairly fresh index, but you can pick a smaller set of pages each day to refresh even more. Some high PageRank pages will end up getting refreshed pretty much every day. But there will often be some high-quality pages that do quite well in our index but are just on the boundary of the daily crawl.

If we had a whiteboard, I could try to draw it too, but I hope that makes sense. Instead of putting it like "sometimes I have a fresh page and sometimes it reverts to an older page" hopefully the explanation makes sense that you've got a pretty good spot in our crawl and sometimes those pages get an extra bit of freshness from our daily crawl.

[metrostang]

Thanks for the answer, it does make some sense. I just had not noticed that happening in the past and of course would love to see fresh pages stick as soon as possible.