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How is the published date on Content Explorer determined?
How is the published date on Content Explorer determined?

Find out how Ahrefs determines the published date of articles on Content Explorer

May avatar
Written by May
Updated over a week ago

There is a published date that is reflected with every URL in Content Explorer.ย 

Ahrefs determines this published date from a few of sources and picks the one that gives us the earliest date.
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Here are some of the sources:

  1. URL First Seen Date - this is when our crawler first saw the URL (not necessarily crawled it though)

  2. HTML Markup - we recognize HTML tags like this one: <meta name=
    "publish_date" content="2017-01-05T00:00:00Z"> and other similar tags

  3. Archive.org - we check for when the page was first indexed

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