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[–] 18502602? ago 

This doesn’t make sense with all the stuff I’ve read on SEO. Google is supposed to be pulling information from the page and displaying results found on those pages. I should be able to find the April dates in the page source code. It’s not there.

No way Google is using place holders. And if publishers were using templates...all the dates would be messed up.

Any other SEO folks out there with an idea to explain the dates?

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[–] 18713770? ago 

Sorry for the late reply. I am the poster who mentioned the searches for the crane and javelin accidents. When I did my testing, I looked at the meta-data on the page and found the false dates. So my impression is that google uses the page meta-data for their date, not the time that google actually found the page.

FYI you do advanced search.. choose a "last update" option. Then on the result page you can choose the "past X" drop-down and select custom range.

When I did that for the javelin impale story, which apparently happened may 9, I see page source like this. var DDO = { contentData: { .... contentPublishDate: "20190508225202", contentUpdatedDate: "20190509002942", ...

So my theory is that google is using the contentPublishDate, which various publishes are too stupid to realize they are fucking it up.