There is an interesting thread that I am not sure if I am looking into too much. The Google Webmaster Help thread has a representative from Rasmussen College complaining that his business management degree page no longer ranks well in Google. Now that is not the interesting part, the complaint. :)
The interesting part is that he said it only started dropping in the rankings when Google decided to add a date in the search results to the snippet. Despite the page not having any date based information on it, despite the fact that the page is not article like content, despite the fact that the page is a sales page for the school - Google dated the page.
So John Mueller of Google simply responds:
Thanks for posting -- I've passed your feedback on to the team!
The question is, why did Google date the page? If it did, did that impact the rankings of the page or was it something else?
Clearly for QDF types of keyword phrases, articles that are old should not rank. But what made this page a dated page? What made the keyword phrase responsive to QDF?
I may be looking into the lack of information in John's post, a bit too much. But I figured I share it and see what you all had to say.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
