What does the time stamp next to a website listing in Google search results signify, other than last time crawled? Does this signify any upgrading of the website in the Google database? Example for BBC website when searching for 'bbc news' news.bbc.co.uk/ - 53 minutes ago Against another listing, www.************.com/ - 6 hours ago Thanks
It may have something to do with how recently that article was posted.. (53 minutes ago in that example). that BBC site is rank 9 and probably gets indexed many times through the day.
I think its just like you said in your post.. Last time crawled. I don't think google shows when the article was posted, just it crawled the site at so and so time and found this..
This second website has been online for just over 2 years and only has PR3 I did a search using the 'domain.com' of the industry leading website for this sector and although the 'domain.com' is number 1, it does not have a 'time' against the listing. The other site '******.com' now shows '9 hours ago' The cache copy time for both sites is within 20 minutes of each other. If I check another industry like 'UK Newspapers' the top 10 results include the 'top 10' uk national newspapers & I also notice that only about 50% of these show a 'time' like '4 hours ago' Any ideas how and why Google is selecting to show 'times' against some listings and not others? Is it signifying some importance to the listings with 'times'?
If its a forum thread, it will show when the past post was made right beside the title link (and number of authors if Google can extract that info also). The days, minutes, hours beside the link is when Google last crawled that page.
The site '******.com' is not a forum site, it is a site similar to the industry leading website 'domain.com' (travel accommodation industry) Also, why does Google treat the other websites mentioned for the 'UK Newspaper' search differently, with some of the big / popular UK newspaper websites not having a 'time' against them www.independent.co.uk cached www.telegraph.co.uk - 4 hours ago www.thesun.co.uk - 5 hours ago www.guardian.co.uk cached www.dailymail.co.uk cached www.express.co.uk - 7 minutes ago