How does BuzzSumo find the published date for content?

BuzzSumo follows a sequence of steps to try and discover the publication date when crawling articles. In order, we look for:

<meta itemprop =”datePublished” content=”DATE_HERE”>
<meta property=”article:published_time” content=”DATE_HERE”>
the URL, e.g. http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/30/how-i-moved-my-startup-from-san-francisco-to-san-diego/

If none of those provide a date, we will use the date we first discovered the article.

If you believe that we are showing the incorrect date for your article(s), it may be because we were unable to establish the publication date using one of the methods above.

If you own the content and are able to edit the metadata, we recommend you add either the schema.org "datePublished" meta tag or the Open Graph "article:published_time" meta tag. Your Content Management System (CMS) will normally offer plugins to help you set this up without any coding.

For example, if you're using Wordpress, Yoast SEO will let you easily insert Open Graph metadata which BuzzSumo can then read.

(Note: This is a good way to ensure we pick up the correct author name for your articles as well.)