Over on Twitter, @semperos has brought an interesting point to my attention. My posts from this blog, when indexed by Google, have the date ‘August 29th 1997’ in the meta data relating to the result. This gives the impression that posts were written on this date:
It seems that GoogleBot is taking the date from the text in the banner on my site:
(From one of my favourite movies)
This is contrary to everything I’ve read, which states that Google’s crawler is either smart enough to recognise the date of your last post, or this is the date of the last crawl. The above screen captures obviously rule out both of these possibilities.
It looks, to the Google outsider like myself, that GoogleBot is just taking the first date it finds on a page it is crawling, and using that in the description on the search results page.
If anyone from Google happens to read this – I’d love an explanation or clarification…