Removing date from Google SERP

Question

We are going through our site analysing the SEO. I find that sometimes on a google results page, some results show a date, others don't. Example (from same query):

I prefer the result not to have the date in it, as 20 Oct 2009 probably has an adverse effect on the clickability of the result.

Is this Google putting it in? Or the page itself? Or a combination of both (IE, if over a certain age, it includes date).

The two URLs are:

http://www.scirra.com/forum/perlin-noise-plugin_topic38498.html

http://www.scirra.com/forum/dungeon-maze-generator_topic40611.html

Any way to remove the dates? I'm thinking, if the age of the thread is > 4 months don't display the date on the page, then Google might not find a date reference for it?

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is not a way to tell Google not to do that as of right now.

But this web page had a couple of suggestions worth mentioning:

1. Use image based dates instead of the usual theme (PHP) generated server side time stamp. In this case, you have to convert the date string to images and hence it may not be very easy to create the image styles that exactly match your theme. Also, you may have to change it every time you change your styles.

2. Use client side logic (javascript) to render the dates so that when Google picks the page, it doesn’t quite read whatever (date) is there between the script tags. I prefer this method.