Is there a standardized (meta?) tag for the date of a website?
It's not a standard, but I remember reading on A List Apart about RDFa. It, or other forms of microformatting, may just be the solution you're looking for.
There have been a few WHATWG Meta Extension proposals, referenced in the HTML5 specification which could cater for the creation date of a page.
"Accepted" Proposalsdcterms.available
- The date the resource became available.dcterms.created
- The creation date of the resource.dcterms.dateAccepted
- The date the resource was accepted.dcterms.submitted
- The date the resource was submitted.dcterms.issued
- The publication date of a resource.
Related "Accepted" Proposalsdcterms.modified
- The modification date of a resourcedcterms.valid
- The validity of the resource.
There are a couple of "incomplete proposals" which haven't been accepted due to a lack of documentation (such as created
).
I don't believe Hangy's answer of dc.date
(now dcterms.date
) would be relevant here as, as far as I'm lead to believe, the date of this is the date associated with the resource. For example, if the resource was a discussion about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the dcterms.date
could be set to 1066. The same could also be said for icas.datetime
.
You could try RDFa (or Microformats) as James and hangy have suggested, Google supports them through a feature called Rich Snippets. Use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see how it's working - for example it does pick up the dtreviewed
and the rating from one of my blog posts which is marked up with hreview.
I suppose the DC.date
tag could be used for that. The Dublin Core metadata is relatively established and well known.
You could also mark your websites with XMDP, which has a date tag that is supposed to be the date of the last modification.