Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Google snippets bug shows old dates based on YouTube embeds

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There is a new bug in the Google search results that seems to be impacting web pages that contain YouTube embeds. Instead of showing the date of the page or article, which is published by the author – Google is showing the date of the video embed, pulled from the upload date.

There are tons and tons of reports of this since over the weekend. Google is indeed aware of it, in fact, Gary Illyes of Google said he’d send the bug to the appropriate team.

To illustrate the bug, do a search for [understanding google panda] and look for the result from www.thesempost.com. You will see Google dates it as December 30, 2014 but if you look at the page itself, it is dated January 11, 2016.

Here is a screen shot of the date on the story:

google-date-bug

If you look at the snippet, this is the date on that:

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Google has been aware of the issue for about two-days and there is no ETA for a fix. Some webmasters and site owners believe their rankings may be hurt by this bug – but that does seem unlikely.

The post Google snippets bug shows old dates based on YouTube embeds appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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