Audit publication and update dates on articles and blog posts. Add visible dates and structured metadata, information search engines can read, and check that modification dates reflect meaningful content changes rather than routine deployments.
Use when auditing article or blog pages for date markup, generating Article JSON-LD with datePublished/dateModified, or checking whether a CMS template surfaces dates correctly.
Review the instructions the agent will receive before you install.
Google uses publication and modification dates to assess content freshness, which influences rankings for time-sensitive queries. Visible dates also build user trust by signalling that content is current and maintained.
dateModified in JSON-LD for every article or blog post2024-03-15T10:00:00Z) in structured data; human-readable in the visible UIdateModified only when content meaningfully changes — not on trivial editsOn each article or blog page, check: (1) Is there a visible published date in the page body or byline? (2) Does the JSON-LD Article or BlogPosting block include datePublished and dateModified properties in ISO 8601 format? (3) Does the <head> include <meta property="article:published_time"> and <meta property="article:modified_time"> Open Graph tags?
<time datetime="2024-03-15">March 15, 2024</time>.datePublished and dateModified to the Article JSON-LD block:
{
"@type": "Article",
"datePublished": "2024-03-15T10:00:00Z",
"dateModified": "2024-11-20T14:30:00Z"
}
<head>:
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2024-03-15T10:00:00Z">
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2024-11-20T14:30:00Z">
dateModified automatically on content saves.Google's freshness algorithm rewards recently published or updated content for time-sensitive queries. Structured date markup lets Google confidently surface the correct date in search snippets; without it, Google must guess from page text or HTTP headers, often producing wrong or missing dates.
Verify that Article or BlogPosting JSON-LD includes both datePublished and dateModified in ISO 8601 format. Check that <time datetime='...'> elements in the body use machine-readable dates. Confirm dateModified updates when content changes, not just on every deploy.
For full implementation details, code examples, and framework-specific guidance,
see references/rule.md.
Rule page: https://frontendchecklist.io/rules/seo/content-dates
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