Dates on Search Results

[diggle]

Why do some search results have dates on and others don't? Is it the ones who have just been updated or re-submitted - and does this help ranking? (I notice the ones with recent dates have fairly high rankings).

[goodroi]

My preliminary research shows that recent news articles are preferred. How much a boost it gives, I don't know yet.

[mcavill]

I always used to think it was when Google last visited the page, but in the few cases I looked at the cache was 1 day on from the date shown in the SERPs. I suppose that may just be a datacenter thing.

[scenpro]

I just noticed that when i click on the Cached link for one of my sites it says the last time it updated it was the 26th of Oct. But just a couple of hours ago it was the 31st
just thought i'd share

[jnmconsulting]

My understanding was these dates are reffered to as fresh tags, I have only seen them once for my site a couple of weeks ago, it was after a deep crawl and lots of bot activity, however the cache date was not even close.
At this point I have seen so many weird things and liks appearing and disappering that I'm not watching that close anymore, gonna drive me nuts.

[Rosalind]

I've noticed that the date shown for many of my sites is usually 3 days ago, and the cached text is usually that old. But the snippet may occasionally reflect more recent changes. Also, no date tends to be an indication that an update is about due.

But all this is probably an attempt to find a pattern where there is none, and the date could be just one of those Google "features", like the link: command, that is really there to keep us guessing.

[steve128]

It used to be pr value, not anymore (although the home page pr does seem to help for new stuff/pages.

To get regular fresh tags, a pr4 min (home page) and very frequent updates of both content and more pages helps.

Fresh tags do not help in the serps, you can find fresh tags way down on page 70..it may appear fresh tags help because you are more likely to see them page 1 or 2 ...nobody goes past page 3 do they?