The topic of having dates in your title tags, and whether this benefits your search engine optimisation (SEO), was recently discussed in a Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.
A title tag is, essentially, the title of a page, which appears at the top of a page’s listing in search results and is also the text shown in the tab at the top of your browser. The discussion of whether to include dates in these tags came from one of the audience members who was working on a website that reports currencies. They asked Google’s John Mueller the question as the website they were working on has dates in title tags as currency values always change.
So, is there any benefit to having dates in title tags?
In the hangout, Mueller said that:
“If you want to. I don’t think it changes anything. For news articles I do think it makes sense to include the date in various places on the page, and that can include the title.”
Mueller added that when Google is crawling your website’s content, it looks at all the mentions and everything you have on your page to work out the date the article was written, and to check if it is still relevant to searchers. This also shows that it is useful to link out to relevant external websites in news articles so that Google can more easily determine if the content is relevant and up to date.
To conclude, having dates in your title doesn’t have any benefit. However, it won’t affect your SEO, especially if you’re writing about time-sensitive information like news articles.
Do you want to improve your website’s performance in search results to help your business to get more website visitors and conversions? At Engage Web, our team can help with our SEO services. To find out more, get in touch with the team today.
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