Is there a standardized (meta?) tag for the date o

Question

One thing that search engines really suck with is the date when a website was created. You know the problem: You search for some CSS or JavaScript problem and Google returns a ton of results from 2002 explaining how to fix the problem in IE 5.5 and Netscape 4.6 while the helpful articles are buried on Page 3. There is only one use for Page 3, and meaningful search results are not it.

Anyway, I just wonder if there is a standardized or at least generally accepted tag or meta tag that I can put on my own pages to indicate the date they were created?

Not that it helps filtering out the old crap out of search results (especially since the people at #1 with their 2002 articles have zero incentive to change), but I'd just like to do my part :P

Answer 1

I suppose the DC.date tag could be used for that. The Dublin Core metadata is relatively established and well known.

You could also mark your websites with XMDP, which has a date tag that is supposed to be the date of the last modification.

Answer 2

It's not a standard, but I remember reading on A List Apart about RDFa. It, or other forms of microformatting, may just be the solution you're looking for.

Answer 3

You could try RDFa (or Microformats) as James and hangy have suggested, Google supports them through a feature called Rich Snippets. Use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see how it's working - for example it does pick up the dtreviewed and the rating from one of my blog posts which is marked up with hreview.

Answer 4

For marking content, you can go the HTML5 route of microdata.

I'm struggling with the same question - google can figure out dates on some content on my site, but not others. I want to help it, so it can always get the date on the article.

I'm trying a combination of the "dc.date" metatag suggested above, and marking up the timestamp that appears on the page using microdata.

Google's example of how to mark up your timestamps using microdata is:

<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2009-10-15T19:00-08:00">15 October 2009, 7PM</time>

Answer 5

There have been a few WHATWG Meta Extension proposals, referenced in the HTML5 specification which could cater for the creation date of a page.

"Accepted" Proposals
dcterms.available - The date the resource became available.
dcterms.created - The creation date of the resource.
dcterms.dateAccepted - The date the resource was accepted.
dcterms.submitted - The date the resource was submitted.
dcterms.issued - The publication date of a resource.

Related "Accepted" Proposals
dcterms.modified - The modification date of a resource
dcterms.valid - The validity of the resource.

There are a couple of "incomplete proposals" which haven't been accepted due to a lack of documentation (such as created).

I don't believe Hangy's answer of dc.date (now dcterms.date) would be relevant here as, as far as I'm lead to believe, the date of this is the date associated with the resource. For example, if the resource was a discussion about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the dcterms.date could be set to 1066. The same could also be said for icas.datetime.