Last Modified Header

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Last Modified Header

Last modified only showing current time and date.

riospace

10:37 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

All of the pages in my website display the current time and date when I check the last modified field in page information.

What do I need to do to my server to have this field show the actual last modified time and date?

john_k

10:46 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

What kind of pages are they (.html, .asp, .php, etc.)?

riospace

10:59 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

.html

lmo4103

11:22 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Something like this?

jdMorgan

12:45 am on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

What kind of server are you hosted on, Apache, MS IIS, or something else?

Jim

penders

1:32 am on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Just a thought... Do you have framed web forwarding set up? This may result in the current date/time being returned when you look at the last modified date in Page Info.

If in FF, you select "This Frame > View Frame Info" then hopefully you should see the correct last modified date (for a static HTML page)?

lmo4103

12:00 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Last-Modified" content="Sun, 06 Nov 2005 14:59:42 GMT">
</head>
<body>
hello
</body>

When I run that, and look at page info, it says "Last-Modified Sun, 06 Nov 2005 14:59:42 GMT"

Live HTTP headers shows
HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified

Whenever you modify the html page, change the last modified too.

penders

2:33 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

<meta http-equiv="Last-Modified" content="Sun, 06 Nov 2005 14:59:42 GMT">

...to explicitly set the last modified date/time of the document I presume.

I have tried this on my local test server and online, with FF and IE and it seems to make no difference to the actual Last-Modified date/time, which is returned in the response headers, which is reported as the Modified date in Page Info and which JavaScript returns as the

document.lastModified

date/time. I still get the actual modified date of the file? Is this as expected?

Sure, FF lists it in the list of meta tags, but that's about it as far as I can see?!

I have read that SEs will take notice of the

<meta http-equiv="Last-Modified"....

tag when indexing pages (perhaps dynamically generated pages), where the actual modified date of the file itself might not have changed? Is this the case?

encyclo

4:38 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

You're going down the wrong track with a meta element as last-modified and web caching is controlled server-side by the server software. The details are transmitted in the HTTP headers which accompany each page request.

Either your server software is not transmitting those details (because web caching has been disabled or because you have dynamically-generated pages), or your ISP or other intermediary has disabled caching.

The meta element may be recognized by a browser, but it won't be effective for proxies and user agents which check only the headers and don't analyse the contents of the document.

What software is the server running? Apache or IIS?

lmo4103

5:40 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

How could you explain how to do it in apache and how to do it in IIS?

lmo4103

7:24 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

I just read this:

Static pages are serverd with last-modified headers, because the modified date is set when the file is saved. [webmasterworld.com]

tedster

10:55 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Clearly, this is a server-specific issue and not a browser or html issue. So I am locking this thread.

Microsoft IIS Web Server [webmasterworld.com]
Apache Web Server [webmasterworld.com]