Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.
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.
One of the most prominent ways (in our experience), is the date shown by the theme on the page itself. Google usually picks and shows the date they see in the content itself and show it in the SERPs.
Here’s a link for more information:
https://rankmath.com/kb/remove-dates-from-search/
I hope that helps.
Thank you.
Hi Reinelle,
do you think it could be this slack sharing feature that you launch ?
nothing been changed on my website, but RM update
Hello,
Dates are not added with the Enhanced Slack Sharing feature so this should not be related to that.
Whenever Google crawls the website, it evaluates the website based on many factors and showing dates is also one of them. If Google finds a page relevant for the dates to be shown, then it shows the date snippet. You can read more about it here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-remove-date-snippets/392126/
If you do not want the dates to be shown, then one of the best ways is to ensure that no date is present on the page.
However, I investigated your homepage’s source and the WebPage schema is present there with the published and modified dates.
If you want to remove the date properties of WebPage schema from your homepage, then you can add the below filter to your website:
add_filter( 'rank_math/json_ld', function( $data, $jsonld ) {
if( is_front_page() && isset($data['WebPage']) ) {
unset($data['WebPage']['datePublished']);
unset($data['WebPage']['dateModified']);
}
return $data;
}, 99, 2);
Here’s a guide that you can follow to add the filter:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/
Hope this helps.
Thank you.
Hello Prabhat,
i have tried that code and google indexed the page the same day, and still indexing the page, but still the date is showing in the results.
could you please tell me if there is anything else i can do ?
thanks a lot
Hello,
Now that you’ve already applied the filter mentioned by my colleague earlier and Google crawled the page the same day.
In this case, you just need to wait for Google to re-crawl the page and index the changes.
We hope this information helps. Please let us know if you need help with anything else.
Thank you
Hello Chandni,
its been like a 10 days since google indexed the new removed published date and still getting the date beside the homepage.
even if you checked the cached version at google, you will see that the cod is working.
could you please check the sensitive data and tell me if there is anything that i can do to fix that ?
thanks a lot
Hello,
Since you have already removed the date from the Schema and yet Google is showing the date in the search results then there is nothing else that you can do. It is completely up to Google how they decide to show the snippets in the search results and there is not much that you can do to control that.
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch in case you need any other assistance.
Thanks.
Hi Jaideep,
even if the date that google shows, is not even exist on my site ?
the current date, is not even the same as the one we removed with the php code your colleague help me with
thanks a lot
Hello,
Even when you don’t have any dates on the page if Google has indexed a version of the page with a date it’s likely keeping it on record and displaying it on SERPs.
The only thing we can do is remove any instances of the date and after that, it’s entirely up to Google to keep the date from the records or update to a different one.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
Hi Miguel,
yeah you are right, i meant the date that google picked in the first place is not on my page.
anyway, do you think, asking search engine to clear the cache of that page will help, or that might harm my ranks.
thanks a lot
Hello,
You may try to clear your website’s cache including any server-level caching software that might be still caching the page. Then, allow Google to re-crawl it. See if it works, if not, then there’s nothing we can do, unfortunately. It is entirely up to Google if they wish to display a date on the SERP.
Looking forward to helping you on this one.
Hi Jeremy,
you mean the WordPress site cache ?
i did that already, always perform a cache clean from time to time.
but my question was if i ask google clear my website cache at google server.
i have also notice that google is reading my booking calendar days.
is there a way where i can stop crawling on a specific block on my page ? only the calendar block i mean
thanks a lot 🙂
Hello,
That is possible, the calendar plugin generates a combination of dates that might allow Google to read it.
Kindly reach out to the developer of your booking calendar plugin and see if they have encountered this issue before. They might also be able to help you hide the dates from the SERP.
Let us know how that goes. Lookin forward to helping you with this one.
Hello Jeremy,
you wont believe what was causing the issue 🙂
it was the custom google map that i created since the website launch, i dont know why google decided to show it now.
i have moved it to contact us page and the second day, i got that date in SERP removed from homepage to contact page 🙂
This might be helpful for other if they got the same issue 🙂
Best Regards
Hello,
I am glad that you are able to resolve it and thank you so much for sharing this information for future reference.
If you 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.
