Weird date range showing in 7-pack results

[Phil Rozek]

I've never seen this before:



I poked around a little bit, but didn't see what might be causing that weirdness to be showing in the results.

Anyone else seen it?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Weird because dates don't usually show in local pack. Looks like a rich snippet of some kind to me.

You can see it here in organic too. 3rd one down. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.massageharmony.com+May&ie=UTF-8

Looks like there was a coupon, maybe was schema or something and got removed - because I don't see it on the site or in cache now.

 

[Phil Rozek]

Yeah, Schema markup was my first thought, but I didn't see it on the site. But be some weird vestige. Of course, I still wonder how those dates started showing up in the first place.

 

[Eric Marshall]

The cached version of the site is different than the live version and it looks like it's done through a different developer/platform (SpaBoom vs. NOX Creative). My guess is they just (like just, just) launched a new site and that date is from something on the old site and Google hasn't recrawled it yet.

What they should be worried about though is that the robots.txt on the new/current site is blocking the whole site from the search engines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

...and they don't have any 301 redirects for old pages and they are all 404-ing. When Google decides to re-crawl it, it's not going to be good.

---------- Post Merged at 08:46 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 08:43 AM ----------

Ok...just found where it's coming from. This is in the source of the cached version of the site:
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2012-05-09"></abbr><abbr class="dtend" title="2020-05-09 00:00:00"></abbr>
abbr class='dtstart' title='2012-05-09'> abbr class='dtend' title='2020-05-09 00:00:00'>

<abbr class="dtend" title="2020-05-09 00:00:00">I have no idea what it is, but it's obviously where that date range came from.</abbr>

---------- Post Merged at 08:52 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 08:46 AM ----------

Oye...sorry if anyone saw all of those edits I did to that post. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to post that line of code without it disappearing...

---------- Post Merged at 09:05 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 08:52 AM ----------

I found a couple of other sites built by the same company that use the same code and show similar date snippets:

http://www.blissanavedaspa.com/
http://www.abetterbodyspa.com/

 

[Phil Rozek]

Very interesting, Eric. Thanks. That markup seems to be part of hCalendar: hCalendar 1.0 ? Microformats Wiki

Why they're using it is beyond me.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

It's definitely odd that they're using it, but it's definitely got this forum talking about it - and who knows who else is discussing this. It makes the listing look different, and generates interest (though maybe not for the most appropriate reasons). The more unique elements you can add to a local listing, the better (I suppose...).