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by patrickhogan1 296 days ago
The bigger challenge here is that we already struggle with basic metadata integrity. Sites routinely manipulate creation dates for SEO - I regularly see 5-year-old content timestamped as "published yesterday" to game Google's freshness signals.

While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.
1 comments
paulddraper 295 days ago
Does that work? There’s no way…

Most web servers use mtime for Last-Modified header.

It would be crazy for Google to treat that as authorship date, and I cannot believe that they do.

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dragonwriter 295 days ago
> It would be crazy for Google to treat that as authorship date, and I cannot believe that they do.

I'm not sure what Google uses for authorship date, but if you do date-range based web searches, the actual dates of the content no longer have any meaningful relationship to what was set in the earch criteria (news seems mostly better but with some problems, but actual web search is hopeless). In both directions -- searching for recent stuff gets plenty of very old stuff mixed in, but searching for stuff from a period well in the past gets lots of stuff from yesterday, too.

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patrickhogan1 295 days ago
On platforms like Wordpress these headers are settable via SEO plugins. Many sites will roll these headers forward.
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