Is there a standardized (meta?) tag for the date of a website?

html date seo meta-tags

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Solution 1

There have been a few WHATWG Meta Extension proposals, referenced in the HTML5 specification which could cater for the creation date of a page.

"Accepted" Proposals
dcterms.available - The date the resource became available.
dcterms.created - The creation date of the resource.
dcterms.dateAccepted - The date the resource was accepted.
dcterms.submitted - The date the resource was submitted.
dcterms.issued - The publication date of a resource.

Related "Accepted" Proposals
dcterms.modified - The modification date of a resource
dcterms.valid - The validity of the resource.

There are a couple of "incomplete proposals" which haven't been accepted due to a lack of documentation (such as created).

I don't believe Hangy's answer of dc.date (now dcterms.date) would be relevant here as, as far as I'm lead to believe, the date of this is the date associated with the resource. For example, if the resource was a discussion about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the dcterms.date could be set to 1066. The same could also be said for icas.datetime.

Solution 2

I suppose the DC.date tag could be used for that. The Dublin Core metadata is relatively established and well known.

You could also mark your websites with XMDP, which has a date tag that is supposed to be the date of the last modification.

Solution 3

It's not a standard, but I remember reading on A List Apart about RDFa. It, or other forms of microformatting, may just be the solution you're looking for.

Solution 4

You could try RDFa (or Microformats) as James and hangy have suggested, Google supports them through a feature called Rich Snippets. Use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see how it's working - for example it does pick up the dtreviewed and the rating from one of my blog posts which is marked up with hreview.

Solution 5

For marking content, you can go the HTML5 route of microdata.

I'm struggling with the same question - google can figure out dates on some content on my site, but not others. I want to help it, so it can always get the date on the article.

I'm trying a combination of the "dc.date" metatag suggested above, and marking up the timestamp that appears on the page using microdata.

Google's example of how to mark up your timestamps using microdata is:

<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2009-10-15T19:00-08:00">15 October 2009, 7PM</time>

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Michael Stum

The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world! Full-Stack Developer on Stack Overflow Enterprise, working to make our little corner of the Internet better for all of us.

Updated on July 10, 2022

Comments

Michael Stum almost 2 years

One thing that search engines really suck with is the date when a website was created. You know the problem: You search for some CSS or JavaScript problem and Google returns a ton of results from 2002 explaining how to fix the problem in IE 5.5 and Netscape 4.6 while the helpful articles are buried on Page 3.

Anyway, I just wonder if there is a standardized or at least generally accepted tag or meta tag that I can put on my own pages to indicate the date they were created?

Not that it helps filtering out the old crap out of search results (especially since the people at #1 with their 2002 articles have zero incentive to change), but I'd just like to do my part :P
Michael Stum over 13 years

It seems that Google supports it, so that may indeed be the way to go.
Michael Stum over 13 years

Interesting. I know Dublin Core for Media Files (I think Adobe is pushing it heavily), haven't seen it for Websites yet. Will have a look.
Alexis Wilke over 8 years

Only this is useful when you put the date (and time) in the page somewhere. I don't think you can put that tag in the <head>, can you?