If you’ve ever worked with Chinese websites or documents, you might have noticed that the date format is different from what we’re used to in the Western world.
This can be confusing for non-native Chinese speakers, but understanding the Chinese date format is crucial if you’re working in SEO.
In this blog post, I will talk about the basics of Chinese date format and why it affects SEO.
How to write dates in Chinese format?
The Chinese dates follow a year-month-day format. The year is written first, followed by the month, and the day of the month. Unlike Western dates, the separators used are different. Instead of using slashes (/), hyphen (-), or periods (.), Chinese characters representing year (年), month (月) and day (日) are used:
For example, 31st July, 2023 would be written as 2023年7月31日 in Chinese (usually no space between numerals and character).
Chinese date format and SEO
It’s a common SEO practice to add the current month and current year to meta titles to indicate content freshness. According to Search Pilot’s survey, 53.6% of respondents reported that adding the current month has a positive impact to organic traffic.
When optimising the title tag for your Chinese content, consider putting the year in front of your title instead of at the end.
Take a look at the following example and pay attention to the position of the year “2023”:
In this example, I am using the same query for “best movie 2023” (“最好電影 2023” in Chinese) for the Hong Kong market – the left one is the English SERP while the right is the Traditional Chinese.
You will notice that most of the English sites put 2023 towards the end. On the other hand, 90% of the websites place the current year in the beginning on the Chinese SERP, even though “2023” is put at the end of the search query.
Therefore, we can assume that putting the year before the title is more common in Chinese context. And a side note, I normally would put “年” (year) after the current year as it sounds more natural.
Conclusion
In conclusion, understanding and implementing the Chinese date format in your SEO strategy is paramount when dealing with Chinese content.
By aligning your content with the local practices, such as placing the year at the beginning of the title, you can enhance your content’s relevance, thereby improving your organic traffic and SEO performance.
