I am trying to understand what the various dates mean in Article
from Schema.org.
From what I can understand is the following:
dateCreated
is when the writer first starting with the article. Nothing has been made public yet for reading.dateCreated
can be earlier or the same asdatePublished
, but not later.datePublished
is when the writer is finished with the article and has made it available online for reading.dateModified
is when the article is modified.
The above is my opinion. What is the general opinion regarding this?
If an article has not be edited will it then contain nothing/null for dateModified
? The reason why I ask is because when you run your code through the structured data testing tool it says that dateModified
is not required but recommended. How can it be recommended for articles that have not been edited from their original source? Should dateModified
then be the same as datePublished
just so that the red error message can go away? Or shouldn't I worry about it and treat it as a warning?
When is dateModified
set for the first time? After dateCreated
or after datePublished
?