Ever notice the date next to a URL listed in the Google search engine results page? If not, I have attached a picture below of an example.
You see the first result, the home page, has a date. The other page, an inner single page, does not have a date next to the URL. What is that date and why do some results have it and some results do not?
A thread over at WebmasterWorld named Date in Google search results discusses just that. The famous GoogleGuy chimes in with the answer to this question.
He discusses that, in the past, Google used to conduct a 'deep crawl' about once a month and 'freshbot' went to pages on a more frequent basis on pages that were updated on a more regular basis, like this blog's homepage. The date was much more noticeable back then, which really wasn't that long ago - remember the Google Dance days? Today, Google's 'freshbot' is much more advanced and is basically able to do deepcrawls on a more frequent basis.
Anyway, the date next to the URL is only shown if:
a) the page was seen in the minty fresh crawl, and b) the current date is within N days of the crawl date, where N is a small integer such as 2 or 3.
Check the thread out here.
