: What meta tag do you use to provide Google with a publication date? Possible Duplicate: How does Google recognize publish date of a post I read about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

@Jamie184

As mentioned in comments, this Question appears to cover all bases:
How does Google recognize publish date of a post

Just to add... there are probably several methods that Google uses in order to determine the publish date (if any) of an article. XML sitemaps and RSS feeds are commonly cited as possible sources, however, Google does often appear to simply get the publish date from on-page content - which is not necessarily correct!

For example... I have a site that has a submitted sitemap.xml and many pages show a publish date in the SERPs. However, the publish date showing in the SERPs does not match the <lastmod> date in the sitemap - for any page. In all cases the publish date that shows in the SERPs is a date that appears on the page itself - which in many cases is not actually the publish date of that page!

Just an observation... On all the pages that have a publish date in the SERPs, that date appears somewhere in the content of that page. If it doesn't appear on the current page, then in Google's cached version there is a date. This always appears to trump any date that might appear in the RSS feed or Sitemap.

Can you find any pages that have a publish date in the SERPs where that date does not appear in-page?

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