After Yoast: Google not showing “post” date

  • Resolved beckyrbsn

    (@beckyrbsn)


    3 years, 10 months ago

    Hi,

    I have been using Yoast (free) as a test for about 2 weeks now, and I’m becoming more convinced that it’s having an impact on how Google is interpreting whether or not to display the “date” of my posts, in the search results.

    Before installing/configuring Yoast, the dates were being displayed for my posts in the search results. My posts have the “last modified date” output (per the theme design), and it worked great. This is what I want because I am actively updating posts, and I think this will increase click-throughs.

    Now after installing Yoast, the search engine results are no longer showing any dates.

    Why do I think it’s Yoast?
    – If I search for my “Category” pages, Google is detecting a date on the most recent post listed, and it shows this date in the search results – perfect!
    – Upon viewing the source code of the “Category” page + the “Post” page, I notice 2 key differences between them in what is output from Yoast:

    – the Post outputs <script type="application/ld+json" class="yoast-schema-graph">INCLUDING datePublished and dateModifiedparameters.
    Equally, the post outputs the following in the meta:

    <meta property="article:published_time" content="2021-01-09T05:09:00+00:00" />
	<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2021-01-13T13:52:52+00:00" />

    – the Category does NOT output datePublished and dateModified parameters. Also it does NOT output those meta properties either.

    I feel that Google is seeing too many dates on the post page and doesn’t know which one to use, so they ignore it!?

    Can anyone share if this is a known issue, or something that’s simple to change/configure?

    Thank you,
    Becky

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Plugin Support Suwash

    (@suascat_wp)

    @beckyrbsn

    datePublished and dateModified these tags are outputted on posts, not on pages and categories. So this is expected behavior. That being said, our plugin outputs other date-related information in schema markup on both posts and pages.

    For your information, in older versions of Yoast SEO, we included a “Date in Google Preview” setting. This controlled whether the date was shown in the snippet preview. Since Yoast SEO 14.7, this setting was removed, and we now always show the date in the snippet preview.

    We’ve removed this setting because it was leading to confusion. Many of our customers reasonably assumed that the setting would influence whether or not the date would be shown in the (Google) search results. In reality, it only influenced the snippet preview in Yoast SEO.

    Thread Starter beckyrbsn

    (@beckyrbsn)

    Hi @suascat_wp – this doesn’t really help answer my question.

    I’m aware of the setting being removed on Google date preview. What I’d like to better understand is why after installing Yoast, that my Posts are no longer tagged with a date in the Google search?

    As I’ve described, I’ve spent hours troubleshooting:
    – the only difference in the source code of a page where the date is displayed in the Google search, vs. the source code of a post where the date is NOT showed in the Google search, is simply what I commented before in the OP.

    If this should not be the cause, then could you advise of anything else Yoast may have altered to result in the behaviour?

    Thanks,
    Becky

    Plugin Support Rumejan Barbarona

    (@onlyincebu)

    Hello Becky,

    When you update a post in WordPress, the Yoast plugin updates the Last Modified date in the XML sitemap as well as the dateModified property in the schema output. Google will parse all this information and will not result in Google ignoring either of the dates. However, as you can read in this article by Google, it will be up to them to decide which date to show (modified date or published date), and ultimately, it will be up to them also to decide whether or not a date is shown in the search results.

    Thread Starter beckyrbsn

    (@beckyrbsn)

    Hi @onlyincebu,

    Thank you, I read the Google article.

    I still find it a little odd that Yoast is outputting so many dates, and given the Google article states that we need to let them “clearly” know what the date is for it to be displayed, I can’t see how we’re doing that after I installed with Yoast.

    Also, I noticed that Google is no longer indexing my images either in their image search. They have slowly disappeared, only leaving the social media images from Facebook in there… Sorry to say but I can only relate this to when I installed Yoast again.

    If you have any ideas let me know. Otherwise I’ll try a different SEO plugin for a month and see if anything changes.

    Thanks,
    Becky

    Thread Starter beckyrbsn

    (@beckyrbsn)

    IN case this makes any difference at all –

    Yoast outputs datePublished and dateModified with the default UTC+0 timezone.

    However, the <body> of my article prints the date and time with a different timezone (since my WP is configured in settings to UTC+8.).

    @onlyincebu – the Google article you share states:

    Make your dates and times consistent. Ensure that the date (and optional time and time zone) match between the equivalent user-visible and structured values. Time and time zone are optional in user-visible data even if provided in structured data.

    Could it be that because there are different dates (only timezone difference), that it could cause such issues?

    Plugin Support Md Mazedul Islam Khan

    (@mazedulislamkhan)

    Thanks for clarifying everything. Even though Yoast SEO is outputting many dates, we can confirm that all are necessary for different platforms and there’s nothing wrong with them.

    The article:published_time and article:modified_time metas are specific to the social media platforms like Facebook and not specific to search engines whereas, the datePublished and dateModified keys in the schema markups are specific to search engines only.

    On the other hand, Yoast SEO uses the UTC+0 timezone as that’s the default timezone and allows our development teams to work with date and time more efficiently. However, it doesn’t mean that Google will show the wrong date and time in the search results as the date and time still shows the same at the end of the day.

    We understand that Google says to use a consistent timezone throughout the site where you are using UTC+8 timezone and Yoast SEO is using UTC+0. However, can you please confirm where exactly the selected timezone UTC+8 is appearing on the front end part of your website? Is it outputting anywhere?

    Thread Starter beckyrbsn

    (@beckyrbsn)

    Hi @mazedulislamkhan

    From a blog post page:

    Source code from Yoast:
    "datePublished":"2021-01-10T01:00:00+00:00","dateModified":"2021-01-23T14:35:47+00:00"
    Yoast outputs the above code 2x in the header. Would you know why?

    Source code from theme:
    <time class="post-date" datetime="2021-01-23T22:35:47+08:00">Last Updated: January 23, 2021</time>

    My theme uses the last modified date to display. I note that even though Yoast uses UTC+0 timezone, it still detects the correct time based on +8 general WP setting. E.g. Yoast last modified time = 14:35, which is -8 hours from my local last modified time of 22:35.
    So, maybe this is not causing the issue.

    Hi,

    There are several different issues mentioned in the previous replies. We will respond to each.

    A. Yoast outputs the above code 2x in the header. Would you know why?
    Can you provide a link to a URL which highlights Yoast outputting the datePublished and dateModified twice in the header? We ask as we would not expect that schema to be duplicated in the header.

    B. No Date Appearing for Link in SERPs
    Can you also provide an example URL which highlights this issue as well?

    C. I noticed that Google is no longer indexing my images either in their image search. They have slowly disappeared, only leaving the social media images from Facebook in there.
    This issue is likely unrelated to the time issue. If you are having issues with this issue, we ask that you make a new topic. Please also provide some example URLs which highlight the issue and/or links to images you are expecting to find in Google Images but which are not.

    Thread Starter beckyrbsn

    (@beckyrbsn)

    Hi @pcosta88,

    A. check this link where it is outputting datePublished x2, and dateModified x2 in header: blog post page

    Note that on the homepage, or any non-blog post page type, datePublished and dateModified are only being output 1x. Interestingly, Google is indexing these sites fine, with dates and also Image search.

    B. Google SERP with no date. Check 2nd result with the link to the post. No date in SERP.

    C. Understood, will look at this issue separately.

    Thanks,
    Becky

    Hi Becky,

    A. We checked the example page and found that the dates appear in both the meta tags and in the schema data. This is what we expect to see.

    Although the dates appear twice in the schema data as part of both the Article and the WebPage. Google does not show any errors for the dates in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool results.

    You can find more details in the Yoast documentation about the Article and WebPage schema types.

    B. For results like tag archives that list multiple posts, the page wouldn’t have a published or modified date.

    In another post result, the dates appeared in the meta tags, schema data, and in the page text. We didn’t find anything that would prevent Google from showing the dates, so this doesn’t look like something that’s related to Yoast SEO.

    If you have other questions about how Google is determining whether search results are displaying dates, you might find some more insight by posting your examples to the Google Search Console help forum. If you find out more, please let us know.

    Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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