How does Marfeel detect the Publication and Last Update date of an article?

Implementation Guides Platform
1

Marfeel classifies articles into new, recent, or evergreen content based on their publication date. Pages that don’t specify a publication date, like home or section pages, are classified as not editorial content.

The Marfeel editorial crawler utilizes an article’s last update date to decide if a page should be recrawled and its metadata updated.

Marfeel extracts both the publication and last update dates sequentially trying these strategies until one works:

  1. JSON+LD (For more details visit datePublished - Schema.org Property and dateModified - Schema.org Property)

    <script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NewsArticle",
  "datePublished": "2021-08-01T04:30:00Z",
  "dateModified": "2021-08-01T05:30:00Z"
}
</script>

  2. Meta item property type

    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2021-08-01T04:30:00Z" id="date">
<meta itemprop="dateModified" content="2021-08-01T05:30:00Z" id="date">

  3. Time item property type as datetime

    <time itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2021-08-01T09:00Z">
<time itemprop="dateModified" datetime="2021-08-01T05:30:00Z">

  4. Time item property type as content

    <time itemprop="datePublished" content="2021-08-01T09:00Z">
<time itemprop="dateModified" content="2021-08-01T05:30:00Z">

  5. Time item property type as node value

    <time itemprop="datePublished">2021-08-01T09:00Z</time>
<time itemprop="dateModified">2021-08-01T09:00Z</time>

  6. Meta article type article:published_time and article:modified_time

    <meta property="article:published_time" content="2021-08-01T17:41:45+00:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2021-08-01T17:41:45+00:00" />
More info: Not updating the last update date can impact positioning on Google News and the News Carousel, among other placements. Marfeel tries to create a visual representation on how most likely GoogleBot sees your site and thus doesn’t update the title.

Content Type

Marfeel automatically computes the Content Type attribute of a url based on the detected publication date according to the above chain.

  1. Evergreen: If an article is older than 7 days it’s tagged as evergreen
  2. New: If it’s been published within the last 48 hours
  3. Recent: If it’s publication date is in between the last 2 and last 7 days.
  4. Not Editorial: Any article that doesn’t specify a publication date.

Based on the rules above any home or sections page with a publication date will incorrectly be considered editorial instead of not editorial content.