While Google is not necessarily known much for search bugs, for past few days many people have been complaining about one on its SERP’s that’s seemingly affecting websites’ ranking, CTR and traffic.
Certain types of posts on Google result pages are showing the wrong published date. While the search giant itself hasn’t made any formal comment, a careful look to it shows that webpages with YouTube videos embedded on it are affected by this bug.
Instead of showing the date when the post/webpage (with embed YouTube video) was actually published/updated/created, Google is showing the date of when that particular video was uploaded on YouTube.
Say, on November 10, 2016, you posted a blog with an embed-YouTube video. The video was originally uploaded on YouTube over a year back on June 5, 2015. The bug is causing result to show the older date on SERP instead of the new one.
And not so surprisingly, websites affected by this bug is seeing a dip in their traffic (or CTR), each one of us look for updated and fresh contents on Google—not years’ old ones. And low CTR and traffic is transcending in a dip in ranking position of the websites.
It’s a glitch that Google is likely to resolve. When— it’s a question that no one knows or can answer to now! Till then, you can only play it safe. Do not embed YouTube videos to your blogs and webpages. And if possible, remove the videos from your existent posts (at least from the important or pillar contents).
