Unable to Remove Date Snippets from Search Results (cont. pt.2)

#965459
  • Resolved Christopher Hansson
    Rank Math free

    This ticket is a follow up to ticket #939823 & #951001
    The intial ticket solved the issue of datePublished and dateModified from my product pages.
    The second ticket solved the issue of datePublished appearing whenever a customer left a review.

    However, even with both of those solved, Google still fetches a date from somewhere.
    I have attached an example image, the issue does not appear for any of my competitors.

    Example here:
    https://imgur.com/a/zBsJGwF

    There’s no datePublished anywhere when inspecting the URL, but Google is still adding the published date to the search results.

    The current code looks like this:

    add_filter( ‘rank_math/json_ld’, function( $data, $jsonld ) {
    if ( is_product() ) {
    // Remove dateModified and datePublished from WebPage
    unset( $data[‘WebPage’][‘dateModified’] );
    unset( $data[‘WebPage’][‘datePublished’] );
    }
    return $data;
    }, 9999, 2 );

    add_filter( ‘rank_math/snippet/rich_snippet_product_entity’, function( $entity ) {
    // Remove datePublished from the main entity
    unset( $entity[‘datePublished’] );

    // Remove datePublished from each review if it exists
    if ( isset( $entity[‘review’] ) ) {
    foreach ( $entity[‘review’] as $k => $rr ) {
    unset( $entity[‘review’][$k][‘datePublished’] );
    }
    }
    return $entity;
    });

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Hello,

    We apologize for the issue you are facing with Google still fetching a date for your product pages despite the filters you’ve implemented. Thank you for providing the details and the example image.

    It seems that you’ve already taken significant steps to remove the datePublished and dateModified properties from your structured data. However, Google can sometimes extract dates from other sources, such as comments or even cached versions of your pages.

    Here are a few additional steps you might consider:

    1. Check for Other Sources of Dates: Ensure that there are no other plugins or theme settings that might be adding dates to your content. This includes checking comments, as Google can pick up dates from there as well.

    2. Inspect Your Content: Make sure there are no visible dates in the content itself, including any hidden elements or meta tags that might not be immediately obvious.

    3. Clear Cache: If you are using any caching plugins, clear the cache to ensure that Google is seeing the most recent version of your pages.

    4. Use Google Search Console: You can use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to see how Google views your page. This can help identify if there are any lingering date properties being picked up.

    5. Robots.txt and RSS Feeds: If you haven’t already, consider blocking search engines from crawling your RSS feed, as it can also contain date information. You can add the following to your robots.txt file:

      User-Agent: *
      Disallow: /feed/

    If these suggestions do not resolve the issue, we recommend replying to this ticket so a human agent from the Rank Math Support team can take a closer look at your specific situation and provide further assistance.

    Thank you for your patience, and we hope to help you resolve this soon!

    Hello,

    We checked your product page and we can see the only visible date from the Rank Math plugin is added in the “og:updated_time meta” tag. You can disable that by using the following filter on your website:

    add_filter( 'rank_math/opengraph/facebook/og_updated_time', '__return_false');
    

    However, please note that Google picks and shows the date that they found in the content itself and this is something an SEO plugin cannot fully control. For more details, you can check this article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-remove-date-snippets/392126/

    Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
     
    Thank you.

    But surely having dates on product pages cannot be intendend? I’d buy it if it was a post/article.

    None of our competitors have this issue, so it’s isolated to this plugin only.

    Hello,

    We can confirm all the visible dates from Rank Math have been removed in this product page. Google has also removed the date from SERPs. You can check the screenshot in the sensitive data section for reference.

    However, as we already mentioned, Google can use any visible dates from your page to show on SERPs even if it is not added by the Rank Math plugin. So, we suggest you check the source code of your product page and make sure all the dates are removed from there.

    Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
     
    Thank you.

    Unfortunately the date is still there. It just refreshed to displaying “four days ago” because we received a review that date, which means the date from reviews are still being fetched from somewhere as well.

    Hello,

    As of the time of writing this reply, the date on the SERP shows “6 days ago” and the only matching date is from the Woocommerce review element. Please see the new screenshots we’ve shared in the sensitive data section.

    As we have mentioned previously, Google looks for any date on the page source so if you wish to remove that as well so Google won’t be able to see it, you may need to change something in Woocommerce settings.

    Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any other questions.

    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.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

The ticket ‘Unable to Remove Date Snippets from Search Results (cont. pt.2)’ is closed to new replies.