Remove date from SERP?

[Imago BorealisParticipant]

Say you look at your google results page and find all hits dated. Are you likely to click the oldest or the newest date? What if your publish date gets older and it influences your SEO ranking? Most of our images don’t really “expire”. So why should they be dated, anyway?

Answers to these and other questions are what Tim wants to explore as I understand it.

Stock Photos at ImagoBorealis.com

[THPStockParticipant]

@Imago Borealis wrote:

Say you look at your google results page and find all hits dated. Are you likely to click the oldest or the newest date? What if your publish date gets older and it influences your SEO ranking? Most of our images don’t really “expire”. So why should they be dated, anyway?

Answers to these and other questions are what Tim wants to explore as I understand it.

Exactly. None of the agencies show dates from what I can see.

Just noticing some dates are disappearing from Google results just now, but only partial, so will take a few weeks or month or two to really see the results.

Will definitely report back when I have something to share 🙂

View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.

[EzeepicsParticipant]

I found this interesting App which, even if it’s very old, it’s working fine for me. Removed all the dates from Blog and images pages. http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-post-date-remover/ 🙂

[sandorgoraParticipant]

i plugged in that date-remover… curious to see what will happen…. (the site is still ok for now)

[lucatoParticipant]

You guys that understand these results in Google, share with us what were the results by using it. ;0)

[THPStockParticipant]

@ezeepics wrote:

I found this interesting App which, even if it’s very old, it’s working fine for me. Removed all the dates from Blog and images pages. http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-post-date-remover/ 🙂

Yeah I found that too, but its WAY old, and perhaps shouldn’t be used with wordpress 3.8.

Also, check your header and you’ll see it hasn’t removed all the dates, only the visible ones. Google will still find the invisible ones such as this tag in your header:

If you give me a few weeks I will tell you if it has all been worthwhile 🙂

View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.

[EzeepicsParticipant]

ok

[THPStockParticipant]

So after a bit over a month, I think it is safe to say that removing the date from all image pages did little. I saw a few images creep up a page or two in Google, but others didn’t move or even dropped.

That being said, my site SERP is terrible for normal google searches, but generally brilliant for google image searches – of which date I think has little relevance.

So in short, for me at least I think the experiment showed that having the date reflected on the page (and thus in SERP) doesn’t have a highly negative impact, but maybe a very, very minor one.

View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.

[sandorgoraParticipant]

thanks for your research

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