Showing a last updated date: Crawl Audit check 193

Short answer: a visible "Last updated" date tells readers whether information is current. Google also reads dates from the page and its structured data. Check 193 warns when it can't find a date in the page's code.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a <time datetime> element, or an article:modified_time or last-modified meta tag.
• Warning: none.

A date in JSON-LD alone (dateModified) isn't counted, and neither is a date written as plain text. Wrap the visible date in <time>.

What Google says

• "Add a user-visible date to the page and feature it prominently."
• "Label your dates appropriately with text like "Publish" or "Last updated"."
• In structured data, use an Article or BlogPosting type and "specify the datePublished and/or dateModified fields."
• "Ensure that the date (and optional time and timezone) match between the equivalent user-visible and structured values."
• "Don't specify future dates".

<p>Last updated <time datetime="2026-10-06">6 October 2026</time></p>

Change the date only when the content really changes. Bumping it without edits misleads readers.

On devmarde.com

Our journal posts show a dated byline in a <time> element, with matching dates in their structured data, so they pass. Our homepage has no date, so this check warns there.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Influence your byline dates in Google Search (updated 10 December 2025), checked 6 October 2026.