datepublished

DatePublished is a metadata property used to record the original publication date and time of a creative work, such as an article, blog post, or news item. In structured data schemes like schema.org, it is defined for CreativeWork and its subtypes to indicate when the content first became publicly available. The value is usually provided as an ISO 8601 date, often including a time and timezone to resolve ambiguities, for example 2024-05-12 or 2024-05-12T14:30:00Z.

In web pages, datePublished is commonly included in JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa as a property such as "datePublished": "2024-05-12T14:30:00Z". It serves as a machine-readable indicator of when the content went live and is used by search engines and other platforms to assess freshness and relevance.

Role in search engines and social platforms: datePublished helps determine recency, enables proper categorization for Article or NewsArticle rich results, and can influence how content is filtered or sorted in search results and feeds. It is distinct from dateModified (the last update time) and dateCreated (the original creation time).

Best practices: ensure datePublished reflects the true initial publication date. Keep consistent time zone information and use a precise timestamp when possible. If the content is later updated, communicate changes via dateModified rather than altering datePublished, unless the work is effectively a new edition or edition with a separate publication event. This aids accuracy and helps users and platforms interpret the publication history correctly.