Google had made some small adjustments to its video structured data documentation to recommend that you include time and timezone information in video structured data. Google has recently been stressing time as an important element in crawling and other structured data components.
Google made two changes to its video structured data:
(1) In the VideoObject section, it use to say for the uploadDate part:
Date: The date the video was first published, in ISO 8601 format.
Now it says:
DateTime: The date and time the video was first published, in ISO 8601 format. We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot
(2) In that same section but in the expires part it use to say:
Date: If applicable, the date after which the video will no longer be available, in ISO 8601 format. Don't supply this information if your video does not expire.
Now it says:
DateTime: If applicable, the date and time after which the video will no longer be available, in ISO 8601 format. Don't supply this information if your video does not expire. We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot
Yea, it says "We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot."
Here is a screenshot of those sections:
Ryan Levering from Google added on Mastodon, "This is part of a push for better timestamps in several markup types. There's a lot of inconsistency between crawler time and UTC time currently in markup that we can't solve alone."
That was all folks.
Forum discussion at X.
