John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, has said whether including the publication date in the title tag of a web page has any impact as far as SEO is concerned.
This topic was discussed in a recent Google Search Central SEO Office Hours Hangout.
An SEO expert working on a currency reporting website asked Mueller if he should include the date in the title when writing an article about currency value changes.
Regarding the date in the title tag, Mueller said:
Putting Dates in Title Tags – Is It Good for SEO?
Mueller says you can put the date in the title tag if you want, but nothing changes when it comes to SEO.
While it might make more sense to use the date in the title of your news article, Google has another way of determining the publication date.
Muller said:
“If you want to.
Because in a news article we try to figure out what the first date on the page is. And we do that by looking at all the mentions and stuff you have on the page.
And you can check that date with these mentions on the page. That way it’s easier to find it, but on pages that are constantly changing like currency prices like you mentioned… the date in the title. ”
The person who asked the question reveals that they not only change the title tag, but also create and publish new articles every day.
Mueller initially misunderstood that the articles were automatically generated every day.
“I think that makes it very difficult to crawl and index your website. So if you’re automatically generating these pages daily for every currency, that’s another aspect It’s like…”
It became clear to Mueller that the articles were not automatically generated.
New articles are manually created and published daily to report changes in currency values, explaining why they have risen or fallen in value.
In that case, Mueller says the date in the title is acceptable because it is equivalent to a news article.
“From my point of view, it’s a normal news article, so if you want to put the date in those places, I think that’s fine. But no problem. Of course.”
In conclusion, adding a date to your title does not affect your SEO positively or negatively.
If you think displaying the date in the page title would be useful to searchers, please add it.
Another important point here is that it makes sense to include the date when something new was published or when the content was significantly changed.
Mueller advised on Twitter earlier this week.
Change the date when writing something new or significantly changing an existing one. Changing the date without doing anything else is just noise and useless.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) February 5, 2022
Listen to Mueller’s full response in the video below.
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, February 2022.
