An invalid date was found. Please fix the date or formatting before resubmitting

Hi @hbk747,

Thank you for reaching out!

We understand that you received a notification from Google Search Console that says that there is no date or an invalid one.

We’ve checked your sitemap_index.xml and see that the Guest Author sitemap does not have a date modified. Is that the sitemap you got the notification for? Can you please elaborate on what plugin (or other solution) you are using for the Guest Authors functionality? We might think that the plugin is not having this metadata and that is why it’s not included in our sitemap.

It did not say on search console where the issue was found (or at least not that I could see).
But yes, I am sure it is the guest author thing. I made a guest author using a plugin called Molongui (pro version) since Molongui, unlike author authorship plugins, allows guest authors to be available on the sitemap and therefore indexed. I created one guest author but assigned no post to her (she has no posts), maybe thats why the error is coming. I am saying this because another error that was showing (not on sitemap) was the fact that Google could not see the guest author page (returned a 404 not found). I asked Molongui, they said that they too could not see that author page and it is because no post had been assigned to the author. Perhaps this is why the sitemap is showing a date issue as well? I will assign a post to a guest author and see if it changes anything.

But would love to hear your thoughts on this

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by hbk747.

Hi @hbk747,

Thanks for the information. We’re not familiar with the Molongui Authorship plugin, but we also expect that if there are no posts assigned to an author, that it’s not possible for that sitemap to show any last modified date.

In that case, you may be able to exclude authors from appearing in the sitemap using Yoast SEO’s settings. You may be able to set “Show in search results” to “No” for all guest authors in Yoast SEO by going to SEO > Search Appearance > Content Types or Taxonomies. To remove individual guest author pages from the sitemaps, you may be able to set “Show in search results” to “No” in the Yoast SEO metabox under the Advanced section.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, we recommend also contacting the author plugin’s developers for more guidance.

I see. Thank you for your response!

Very helpful

What I did was assign the post to that sole guest author. Google has since then said that the page has become indexable and is in the process of indexing it, however the sitemap still displays the same error. Maybe after the page indexed, the issue should resolve itself.

I shall let you know hopefully by tomorrow.

Yes, please keep us updated.

@hbk747 Can you please let us know whether the warning has been resoled?

@devnihil No, unfortunately the error is still present.

I am actually waiting for Google Search Console to recheck that author’s link (which returned a 404 no found since there was no content there). I added a post to the author and then have requested google to “validate fix”. It usually takes a 4-7 days or so at least from my experience. I am still waiting on them. The sitemap still shows the error.

If you go to https://www.paradigmshift.com.pk/guest-author-sitemap.xml
and check guest authors, you will not see a last mod entry. However, if you click on guest authors, you will see there is one guest author and that a last mod is available there.

Thanks for checking in

This is very odd as the sitemap index doesn’t show the last modified date for the guest author sitemap whereas, the guest author sitemap shows last modified date for the author page.

So, once Google recrawls the sitemap index, we believe there will be still an error due to the missing last modified date in the sitemap index for the guest author sitemap.

In this case, can you please confirm whether the issue persists in a fresh WordPress installation where only Yoast SEO and the 3rd party Molongui Authorship plugins are active? If it does, we’ll recommend you please submit a bug report directly at our GitHub development repository so our development team can look into this issue further.

However, if the issue doesn’t persist on a fresh WordPress installation, this could be an issue specific to your setup then.

I see. Thats sad to hear. I thought it would resolve itself.

I will try that and get back to you.

Regards

@hbk747 Please let us know once you’ve had a chance to test that.

@devnihil Hello, molongui did an update so the date is now available on the sitemap.

You can check it here https://www.paradigmshift.com.pk/sitemap.xml
However, Google still has for some reason not picked on this. Maybe since the update was just made a 10 ish minutes ago from the time of writing this post.

Hi,

We can see on https://www.paradigmshift.com.pk/guest-author-sitemap.xml that Last Mod is showing. See image: https://pasteboard.co/Jr3H0Cn.png.

If Google Search Console is still tossing out errors for it, we suggest the following actions:

We suggest the following actions:

1. Clear all your caching from your theme, plugin, server, CDN like CloudFlare or browser. If you are not sure how to clear caching from theme/plugin please speak to those authors. If you want to clear cache from the server, please speak to your host provider. To clear the cache from a browser use this guide:?https://yoast.com/help/how-to-clear-my-browsers-cache/.

2. Delete your sitemap in Google. Doing so will not hurt the SEO of the site. This guide explains more (scroll to the bottom):?https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en.

3. Submit the sitemap again. Be sure to submit only sitemap_index.xml and nothing else.?This guide explains more:?https://yoast.com/help/submit-sitemap-search-engines/.

4. Monitor the results to see if the issue resolves and pages get indexed.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Pcosta88.

@pcosta88 Hello

I dont think that will be required as google has started displaying everything in the sitemap as fine. I think it just had not read the new changes in the sitemap during that time.

I will request that you keep this thread open for a day or two so I can see if nothing changes again, but yes, it seems to be fine now.

Thanks!

Hi,

Yes, you can also just wait for Google to crawl your sitemap again with the updated information like the last modified date. As long as there aren’t any errors being thrown out or reported, it should be fine.

We’re glad to hear that the issue with the sitemap was sorted! If the issue has been resolved totally, please feel free to let us know so we can set this thread to resolved.

Yes, i think everything is fine now!

The only thing that is worrying me is that I have added 2 guest authors, Google reads only 1 since it has not read the sitemap after I added the second. I know this is unrelated but do you know how to get google to read the guest author sitemap again. That author’s (the one I added recently) page has been indexed but it says “indexed, not submitted on sitemap”

Google read the guest authors sitemap on 11th of September last. Do I just wait orc can I expedite this process?

Again sorry for the tangent. And yes, this is resolved!