Title contains a past year
title_obsolete_yearShort answer
The title carries a year that is older than the current one and not older than the page's own publication year — the "Guide 2025" that was true when written and now reads as stale. Google rewrites dated titles that contradict the content; readers skip them. Update the year when you update the content, or drop the year.
Why it matters
A year in the title is a promise of freshness. When the calendar moves on and the title stays, two things happen: Google may replace the title in results with something from the page, and searchers who see "2025" in 2026 pick the competitor that says 2026. A title that mentions a historical year on purpose ("highest since 2007", "2025 annual results") is not stale — Glimana leaves those alone.
How Glimana detects it
The rule reads all four-digit years in the title, takes the largest, and fires when it is before the current year but not before the page's publication year (from datePublished or the article date). A past year that is earlier than the publication year is treated as a historical reference and skipped — this exclusion came from news sites, where "2025 net profit" published in 2026 is correct.
How to fix it
- Find the affected pages in Glimana. Open Issues › Title contains a past year. Every affected page is a row; open one to see the evidence Glimana recorded for it (the measured value, the offending element or the target URL). The same list sits on the task card under Tasks, and the page's own detail view under Pages shows its full signals.
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Apply the fix on your platform.
Either refresh the page and change the year, or remove the year from the title and keep it in the body where it can be updated. Do not just change the year without touching the content — Google treats a bumped date on unchanged content as a quality question.
Use the SEO plugin's
%currentyear%variable in the title template only for pages you genuinely re-verify each year; otherwise edit the post title.Edit the product/collection/page title or its Search engine listing title.
Same rule: derive the year from a "last reviewed" date you actually maintain.
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Publish and clear caches. Save and publish, then make sure the crawler will see the new version: WordPress — clear the page cache in your cache plugin and purge the CDN; Shopify — theme and content changes go live on save, but purge any CDN in front of the store; custom code — deploy and purge the edge cache. Check in a private window or with
curl -s https://your-domain/page | grep -i '<title\|canonical\|robots'that the live HTML has changed; Glimana reads what the server sends, not what your browser has cached. - Verify in Glimana. Open the task under Tasks and click Mark as done. The affected pages are queued for a verification crawl within a few hours, and the task closes when the title no longer contains an obsolete year. If the check still fails, the task returns to New with a note; when it passes, the task is listed under Resolved technical issues on Impact reports. To check sooner, use Re-crawl affected pages on the issue.
How the fix is verified
Re-crawl; the task closes when the title no longer contains an obsolete year.