Content freshness dates
For editorial pages (articles, blog posts, news), a clear publish or update date helps readers and search systems judge whether the content is current. SEO Perception flags pages that look like editorial content but are missing those dates, or where the newest date we can find is older than about 24 months.
What we look for
- Missing date — an editorial page has no parsed publication or updated date.
- Stale date — an editorial page has a date older than the freshness threshold (24 months).
When this check runs
The check only runs on crawl rows that are HTTP 200, not noindex, and look editorial—either via JSON-LD types such as Article, BlogPosting, or NewsArticle, or via a URL path such as /blog/, /news/, or /article/ (utility paths are excluded).
Where dates come from
During the crawl we read dates from, in order of preference:
- JSON-LD (
datePublished,dateModified,dateCreated) <meta property="article:published_time">andarticle:modified_time<meta property="og:updated_time"><time datetime="…">
If none of those exist on the page, we may fall back to the HTTP Last-Modified response header and note that source in the issue details.
What to do
Add a visible publish or last-updated date that matches structured data when you use Article/BlogPosting markup. Refresh genuinely outdated posts, or clearly mark evergreen pages so the date readers see matches reality. After you publish fixes, run Recrawl site when you want the crawl snapshot to catch up.