How to Find the Date When a Web Page was First Published on the Internet

Basically knowing the date wherein a website is published is a broad idea. If in case you do not know, there are several type of dates which you need to be taken into consideration when you are looking for ways to find the publishing date of a website. These are the cache date, discovery date, and the publication date.

1. Cache Date – this is the date wherein a website has been crawled by the Google Bot. This contains some of the XML sitemaps.
2. Discovery Date – this is the date wherein the website is finally crawled by the search engines. With this, the website is now shown on search engines making it now active website.
3. Publication Date – this is the date wherein the website owner finally uploaded the website online. This can also be considered as the “Upload Date”.

Knowing the Publishing Date with a Trick

Now, there are some website owners who decided not to show the publishing date of their website for any other valid or even invalid reasons. However, do not be that worried since there is a simple trick to find it without using any software. This is actually a simple and safe hack using Google.

You should go to the Google search engine (www.google.com). On that type in the full URL on the search bar of the website you are aiming to view the publishing date along with the word “inurl:”. It should look like this: google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.yoursite.com/page “

After that, do not forget to again include the word “&as_qdr=y15” at the end of the link without the quotes. It should look like this: google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.yoursite.com/websites&as_qdr=y15

Then, hitting the “Submit” button will show you the actual publishing date of a website. It will be located just next to the title appeared on Google results.

Although you can rely with this trick, it can never be 100 percent accurate as Google may commit bugs on their databases. At least, this is a huge help.