Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math, and sorry for any inconvenience caused.
It is not up to an SEO plugin to add or remove the date from SERPs.
Google and other search bots pick that up from your post content. If your post has any reference to data in it – Google will pick that date and show it in the SERPs.
So, you must edit your theme files to remove all instances of the date from your single posts/pages. If you aren’t sure how to do that, please ask your theme provider for help.
I hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
I am not sure but Yoast has this option to enable the date or remove (not sure) so I thought RankMath has this option too.
Hello,
Yoast cannot do that either. The option you might be referring to removes the date from the “search preview” that you see in the WP backend.
Date hidden: https://i.rankmath.com/ctkwCY
Result: https://i.rankmath.com/ltSPJn
Date enabled: https://i.rankmath.com/sR3DFC
Result: https://i.rankmath.com/YHzhvH
This does not affect the actual SERPs. If the date is shown in the frontend using your theme, it will still appear in the SERPs.
I hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
I also wanted to add that Google won’t give a definitive, single answer for how they pick a date. There are several ways through which Google picks the date to be shown in the search results. Please read this article:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/03/help-google-search-know-best-date-for.html
One of the most prominent ways (in our experience), is the date shown by the theme on the page. Google usually picks and shows the date they see in the content itself and show it in the SERPs.
Since this can not be controlled by an SEO plugin, we do not show the date in our SERP preview.
But, we do add the correct date in the Schema Markup generated by the plugin:
https://i.rankmath.com/RjC6x3
You can read the following article further if you want to understand more about it:
https://searchengineland.com/google-explains-how-dates-within-search-results-snippets-work-313742
I hope that helps. Thank you, and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
