Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with the News Sitemap and the time zone settings. The timestamps in the News Sitemap are indeed based on the publish date and time of your posts. To ensure that your posts reflect the correct time zone, you will need to adjust the publish date and time settings in your WordPress dashboard.
Here’s how you can change the date and time on your posts:
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Navigate to the Post/Page: Go to the post or page you want to edit and click on Edit.

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Click on the Edit Link: Under the Publish meta box, click on the Edit link next to the publish date.

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Set the Date and Time: Adjust the date and time according to your local time zone (GMT 03:00). You can also schedule it for a future date if needed.

Once you have updated the date and time, Rank Math will automatically update your sitemap accordingly. However, please note that Google may still display the old date if it has cached it. It’s important to ensure that the structured data reflects the new date as well.
If you continue to experience issues, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further. Thank you for raising this concern!
Sources:
How to Change the Date & Time on Your Posts/Pages » Rank Math
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math support.
Please note that we recently changed the sitemap implementation.
The timezone will now be a constant +00:00, and the post time will be converted to match the +00:00 timezone.
If you check the posts you’ll see the Last-Modified time has been converted to the UTC timezone. This is the default behavior of the plugin and expected since a recent update.
If you still want to change it you will have to make changes directly to the plugin files. You can edit the wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/includes/modules/sitemap/class-timezone.php
file.
And change the UTC
with your preferred timezone on line 40. Since you want UTC +3:00
, the code should be like this:
$date_time = new DateTime( $datetime_string, new DateTimeZone( '+3:00' ) );
Please note that these changes will be overridden by each update and you will have to make the changes again.
Also, there is no benefit in modifying the code, as Google recommends using the UTC timezone and will be able to detect the correct last modified time. That’s why we made this change in the plugin.
Hope that helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.
Hello,
We are super happy that this resolved your issue. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.