Increasingly I feel like this is one of those pieces of metadata that we should be moving out of the page. I would suggest moving it into the browser (i.e. rea

Increasingly I feel like this is one of those pieces of metadata that we should be moving out of the page. I would suggest moving it into the browser (i.e. read a meta tag or header) but the obvious problem is that they’ll just be forged and it would almost immediately become pointless. Search engines could help here. If Google were to provide a last cached date (or a date of the last significant change) in the search result that would be far more useful. They certainly have this information from crawling, and it would be difficult to forge as constant substantial changes to game the system would be both expensive for the author, and harmful to the page’s ranking.