Publishing post also triggers “Post Update” in Gutenberg Caused by RM

Hi,
Apologies for the late reply.

I am not sure what function your theme is using to check the post update date, but by default, WordPress updates both published_date and update_date when a post is published. If your theme is altering this default functionality of WordPress then that’s not a good thing. They should instead compare the post published & update date frontend and show the Update date only when it is different from the Published time.

According to the Theme Author,
The same approach uses a default (official) WordPress theme: https://github.com/WordPress/twentynineteen/blob/master/inc/template-tags.php#L14-L34

I would like to share with you a function that is responsible for showing up the date:

`function aquene_get_posted_on() {
$time_string = ‘<time class=”entry-date published updated” datetime=”%1$s”>%2$s</time>’;
if ( get_the_time( ‘U’ ) !== get_the_modified_time( ‘U’ ) ) {
$time_string = ‘<time class=”entry-date published” datetime=”%1$s”>%2$s</time><time class=”updated” datetime=”%3$s”>%4$s</time>’;
}

$time_string = sprintf( $time_string,
esc_attr( get_the_date( DATE_W3C ) ),
esc_html( get_the_date() ),
esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( DATE_W3C ) ),
esc_html( get_the_modified_date() )
);

return ‘<span class=”posted-on th-block”>’ . $time_string . ‘</span>’;

}`

As you can see from the code above, the theme does check/compare if the date is not the same ( get_the_time( ‘U’ ) !== get_the_modified_time( ‘U’ ) ) using native WordPress functionality.

But there is a slight difference between the published time and update time as you can see here which is caused by Rank Math because it updates the post after publishing. (See the complete thread.) Your support also acknowledged it.

Also, this issue is not specific to the Rank Math plugin. I checked it with another SEO plugin and the same thing happens. You might want to get in touch with your Theme developer to ask them to change how they are handling the Post update date.

This doesn’t help. Just because some other SEO does it, does not mean Rank Math should either.