by Media Optimiser
O. Gaywood
O. Gaywood
Britons seem to have an innate reaction that tells them that there are certain things are wrong. For example, in the mind of the average Brit the words 'colour' and 'favourite' should always contain the letter U, 'search engine optimisation' and 'organised' should have an S not a Z (which should be pronounced 'zed' not 'zee') and dates should be written in the format DD-MM-YYYY. Google, being an American company, sadly doesn't agree and recently has begun to show some results with a date beside them - presumably to help the searcher in terms of relevancy - but they're not all completely accurate.
Sites using the British format are having trouble if their page is being dated within the first 12 days of a month as this can be, and is, confused with an American date. A site with the date 06/11/2008 will be displayed as 11 June rather than 6 November as a Brit would have intended as found by British company Ensurve, who blogged about the change on the first of January.
Not all pages have had this new feature added to their results; this seems mainly to be because there is no mention of a date on the page. The ones that have been included, or afflicted, so far do not seem to be intentionally trying - there is no mention of the date in the meta tags or anywhere in the head, just mentioned somewhere in the body text. Of course, this won't always have a direct relation to when the work was actually published, but in some cases - such as for news sites - if you have breaking news on the 1 February (01/02) and Google is telling everyone that your page was created/updated on 2 January your click through rate is not going to be as high as it otherwise could be.
At the moment there seems to be no easy way for sites to tell Google that they're based in the UK - having a .co.uk domain doesn't seem to be make any difference and searches on google.com and google.co.uk show the same, American, layout.
