Typo in settings

Hi @starbuck,

I’m glad you like the plugin ??

It’s not a typo. But I think I might need to improve the wording by changing it into:

This can be prevented by leaving the following options unchecked.

What do you think?

I believe I understand the intent, I just didn’t understand the concept:

My original thinking was that a homepage does get refreshed by dynamic content, so just to ensure a bot catches that it’s being regularly updated, we do want a Modified timestamp in the page.

However, I’m now understanding that unless we manually modify a page, the post object does not get its Modified timestamp updated, and that could cause a page to look stale. So you’re saying remove the timestamp so that’s not a factor in determining freshness.

OK, if that’s correct, I understand – but as you can see I had to think it through. Perhaps you could provide text to explain this as an aid to helping people to understand why they’d want a specific setting.

Thanks for the exchanges!

Hi @starbuck,

So you’re saying remove the timestamp so that’s not a factor in determining freshness.

Correct.

It’s very difficult to assume whether the page has changed. For instance, many page builders build queries that can’t be interpreted before they loop.

If the homepage is a blog, it’s likely you’ll rarely touch it although it changes whenever you post something new.
In the last few updates, I’ve implemented blog-page update checks for the sitemap; however, these updates aren’t reflected in the article meta tags.

In any case, Google doesn’t like stale pages. As I’ve explained in this comment, they will ignore the sitemap tags and crawl regardless, for example.

Most importantly:
I have yet to see any public use of the dates. So, I can only assume Facebook, Google, and others use it for internal purposes. Nevertheless, it’s often best to let them conjecture if you can’t provide veracious data.

To conclude, the option currently is described in a discouraging way for most users. Which is best left as is. My suggestion above still is feasible, however.

I thank you for your time here. I recently looked closely at searching Google based on date, and indeed they are not using the last-modified date in WP site headers for Searching. Only they know if their ranking algorithms use that field. And of course there are other search engines who may or may not check that metadata.

Given this discussion I actually don’t think it’s necessary to change the text as originally suggested.

But now I have to wonder why not change the last-modified value on the home page (without generating revisions) each time a new blog post is created. If blog posts do change the content of the home page then this wouldn’t be “gaming the system”. The fact that WP does not do this automatically is a technical detail of this software, I don’t think it was a design decision.

I mean, I understand the value in removing the field to hide an old number. But there’s no harm in ensuring that number is accurate for those crawlers that give it any value. If actually changing the home page last modified date is undesirable then what about replacing the value rendered in the header with a value generated by this plugin, using the actual creation date of the most recent post. I understand that’s not perfect either as some posts and CPTs don’t get on the home page, but now the question is whether “last-modified” is an indicator of Site activity versus activity on that one page.

This is a new area for me so please consider my suggestions na?ve but well-intended. Please feel free to suggest that I should do more research to catch up, and that the mechanisms in place are well thought out and all working as best as possible given how things really work. ??

Thanks again.

Hi @starbuck,

But now I have to wonder why not change the last-modified value on the home page (without generating revisions) each time a new blog post is created.

It’s quite simple:

1. It requires an extra merging (heavy) database call (AFAICR).
2. We can’t be certain of the accuracy of the output.
3. Many users use the home-page as blog template, while it’s actually overwritten by a page builder. Mind you this is very bad practice.

Your suggestion is perfect and it will improve that output, but it’s technically obstructed.
For that reason, it’s up to the user to output that date on the homepage while it’s also disabled by default. Although, they might not be aware of the bounded issues.

In any case, if you wish to pursue this you may always open up a GitHub Issue, where others might join in with suggestions tackling the aforementioned restrictions ??

Cheers!