Webflow SEO - published date. Static and CMS

In search results many results have a date published at the start of the meta description.

How do add the date published to a static page and also CMS template pages?

Thanks

Not so evident to understand why this date is shown in the results.

I just googled something random and I’m taking the 1st result with a date:

http://vincent.polenordstudio.fr/snap/8f3gr.jpg

The date is followed by a text that’s not the meta description:

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out a step-by-step process you can adopt to help increase search traffic to your blog over time. … Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about blog post SEO, specifically how to …

The meta description is:

<meta name="description" content="With the right process and a dose of patience, SEO success is always within reach — even if you're running your own blog. Optimizing your blog posts begins as early as the inception of your idea, and from then on you'll want to consider your keyword targeting, on-page factors, your intended audience, and more. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out a step-by-step process you can adopt to help increase search traffic to your blog over time.">

And it’s not even the beginning of the aticle:

http://vincent.polenordstudio.fr/snap/pwjm7.jpg

It’s an extract of some sentences from the top of the article:

http://vincent.polenordstudio.fr/snap/pwt3n.jpg

Google processes it by itself I guess and add the date alone. I checked that because I think when you see a date, it’s never in the meta description. It’s added because google can figure that it’s an article and when it was published.

If your site is well organized, if you use HTML5 tags to define your articles in their own page and in the lists that opresent them, if you use H1 everywhere an article is mentionnes (yes, multiple times by page), if your date isn’t hidden etc… then I guess the date will show up in results.

Now I do a search to find a content of mine, published with Webflow:

http://vincent.polenordstudio.fr/snap/62sbv.jpg

I get the date of the published content before my meta description. It’s the date of publication of the article, but it’s not in the meta description.

Here is a screenshot of my Article template SEO settings. I use a combination of static text and dynamic content to compose both my titles and descriptions:

http://vincent.polenordstudio.fr/snap/zm4w4.jpg

Again, not date.

But you have your question answered, technically, with this screenshot, don’t you? On dynamic pages such as templates you can add fields from the CMS to compose Titles and descs, for SEO, OG and RSS. Just click on the +Add purle link ont the top right of any box.

So yes, you CAN add the date in the Description field. However, don’t do it, for 2 main reasons.

  1. HTML things are there for a reason: a description is a description and you shouldn’t put a date in it, it doesn’t describe the content. The description field is very important, you have a few words to say it all. What matters the most is the title, then in the description you use other words to make people want to read your content. Avoid any cut in sentences, don’t overflow etc…
  2. Google will figure the date anyway.

As for adding a date to a static content, there’s an HTML5 tag that goes into the <head>section of the page’s code:

<time pubdate="pubdate">

Bruce Lawson's personal site  : The best of <time>s (if Bruce says it…)

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See How to get Google to display the published date of blog post in the search results? - Webmasters Stack Exchange

Hint: it’s not meta description.

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So you’re linking to that code in <head>

<meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2015-02-05T08:00:00+08:00"/>
<meta itemprop="dateModified" content="2015-02-05T09:20:00+08:00"/>

You’re going to find dates declaration on Webflow’s own blog articles, but not in meta. Lower down the page in a schema.org delcaration.

If you create content with Webflow and use the date data (or not) nothing is added in the meta. yet, Google serps gets the date.

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You’re right, I thought we could choose the format like this

Screenshot_2018-03-06_200306

in the code editor with the meta tags, but I was wrong.

Screenshot_2018-03-06_200311

So apparently it’s not possible in Webflow.

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After looking around, the declaration to use today should be this one:

<time itemprop="dateCreated" datetime="2018-03-02">

So in the <head> section of the page’s custom code we could do this:

http://vincent.polenordstudio.fr/snap/sel6i.jpg

Except that, as Sam said, it won’t work because we won’t be able to use the correct date format.

So if you want a proper workaround, you’ll need to add a field to your collection and enter a date in the proper format manually.

For the static pages, simply add the date in the page header code manually.

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So surely Webflow aren’t typing dates into schema manually via the CMS?

I’ll ask but it’s possible that they do. They don’t necessarily develop magic for their own good. For example you can ask yourself how to place a diferent add in the middle of their articles… well their articles are made of 2 big RT, like you would solve that design problem yourself.

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Here’s what we do for blog posts:

And we also set the publication date and time manually using the date/time field, though I’m fairly certain that’s redundant! (Ha.)

The CMS autogenerates data for date created, edited, and updated, but doesn’t expose it to Google without you doing so (such as through the metadata in the screenshot above).

We don’t do any of that for static pages, though you could do it manually as Vincent mentioned.

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Thanks John. this is good to know. I wonder if I could add a function to a static page head to generate a date each time a page is updated. I guess not as all pages are published together? Anyhow CMS is more critical and the functionality is good on this front! cheers

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Hi @Tasos_Koutsofavas

Here you go: Overview dynamic content | Webflow University

Purple bubbles = the fun name for ‘dynamic embeds’ :slightly_smiling_face:

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Here’s what you are (possibly) missing: both the examples are blog posts (and not regular pages) which would have a specific publishing date. I checked our own blogs in search results, it shows the date the post was published on.

@vincent I’m curious if you have any update insights on this 3 years later.

Seems like something that should be built into webflow at this point.

I would also like to know about this. I just want to see when a static page was last updated, which seems like it should just be listed in the settings similar to a collection item. Surely this data exists in Webflow somewhere already? Is there really no way to access it?