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Google adds date marks to image search

Google adds date marks to image search

Google has gone even further in its campaign for recent results, adding date marks to news queries in its image search section. The Google Images with Date Annotations update was officially launched on April 15, although keen-eyed search engine optimisation commentators noticed the change coming through in particular searches several days before.

The Date Annotations change puts a small date watermark in the lower right corner of the image, notifying the searcher whether the image was put up one day ago, an hour ago, or longer. Google admitted in its blog announcement that the lack of dates for some images could cause users frustration. The dates will appear on the thumbnails of images uploaded within a given period of time.

Although the change won’t affect the search engine optimisation plans for many websites, it is yet another indication of Google’s weighting of recent results. SEO experts have noticed a marked change in the search engine’s leanings over the last couple of years, to the extent that many companies advise clients to include twice-daily content updates on their list of SEO jobs in order to stay ahead of competitors. An increasing number of sites have been aiming for Google’s approved news source list for similar reasons.

For sites that do have a news or image presence, the change is yet more motivation to stay on top of content updates. Even for those sites as yet unaffected, this further step toward recently updated results shows that time is an important factor for SEO.

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