Hi @stevepalmeratwordpress
I’m sorry to hear that it confused you. First, I would like to clarify that the even if the “Date?and separator” shows within the meta descripton field UI from the latest version 22.7, the same date or separator won’t be added to your meta description within the source code. You can confirm this by?checking the source code. The meta description you’ve added to the field will be outputted as the same page source code without the Date and the Separator. So don’t worry about this.
We added the Date and Separator to the meta description field UI to help our users better understand that Google and other SERPs may show the date in the meta description on the search results. While writing the meta description for your page, consider that the characters of the Date and separator (which will be about 10-14 characters and may get added by Google and search engines) may result in a cut-off of the meta description you have added.
Search engines may display the date in the results based on their algorithms. Unfortunately, as mentioned here, there’s no way to directly control whether they show a date or not. That’s why we always display the date in the preview and consider it when calculating the meta description length. So there has been no change in this.
The current change concerns only the input field for the meta description, where we want to clarify that the date is also counted as part of the meta description. Again, there has been no change in how we calculate the length. So be assured that the color of the traffic light won’t change for any of your website’s content with this UI change on the Yoast metabox.
We’re sorry to hear that this UI change to better clarify on how the meta description characters has caused confusion! Rest assured nothing get changed to your meta description output on the source code.
