Often you will see dates in the Search results snippets when blog or news related content shows up in the organic Google search results. Did you know you can lose the ability to show those date bylines if you try to trick Google by faking the date to make it look more recent that the actual date/time it was published?

Here is what the date byline looks like:

Google’s Gary Illyes said at State of Search that these dates are good for search, that they make it more useful for searchers when they are looking for content. So if you abuse the date and fake it, Google can take away the ability for a site to show it.

Here are tweets from that coverage:

Date bylines in SERP are better for search. Hiding or artificially updating them can hurt. Via @methode #StateofSearch

— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) October 10, 2017

@methode believes it is possible that a site that manipulates its published dates could lose those date bylines in SERPS #StateofSearch

— Mark Traphagen (@marktraphagen) October 10, 2017

Google is aware of both technical issues around dates and webmasters trying to trick them, we’ve seen it before. Personally, I want Google to penalize articles that do not have dates on them when they should.

Anyway, keep this in mind – do not try to trick Google with fake dates. I know it happens and Google can be fooled here but Google might be working on something bigger here.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier – I am currently offline today.