Wrong dates in search results

I had same issue never got fixed but when I published a new article it said posted 7 hours or 19 hours when searching it in regular search, but it would show posted 1 minute ago on google news.

I wasn’t using Ravans sitemap but another sitemap on here, so its not his sitemap.

Someone said it could be most popular posts widget? I have related posts and most popular post plug ins, using jetpack but not sure if that is the issue. I was told to use those so people stay on your site longer so they can click related posts to prevent bounce rate.

Hi @borange thanks for your thoughts! It’s getting more and more interesting and strange. I’ve looked at both and found that Jetpack’s Popular Posts/Pages widget does not use any date notation, it’s just a list of links, so I see no reason why Google would get date information from that one (unless the widgets was changed recently) but Related Posts does include dates.

A Related Posts block has in each item a P tag like this:

<p class="jp-relatedposts-post-date" style="display: block;">September 28, 2018</p>

Still, it’s just text, not a time tag, date meta or datePublished structured data, so no real reason for Google to take such info as the official post date… Maybe only when there is no other date info in the posts page source? But even then it should fall back on the date timestamp provided in the XML Sitemap before picking a random (date-like) text string from the page content. Weird!

@ravanh

Sorry for the late reply, what did you mean by “Any chance I could see one live?”

what did you mean by “Any chance I could see one live?”

Such a Popular Posts (or other kind of) widget that might be causing these wrong dates ??

Hi @ravanh

Sorry for the late reply but I am still facing this problem up to now.

Here’s a link to one of our my articles to see the widget which google wrongly uses to index articles.

https://arsenaltruefans.com/2018/12/unai-emery-hints-at-recalling-arsenal-star-from-loan

In that page above, look where it says “MORE IN TRANSFER NEWS”

So its like this, that article above is in the category of “TRANSFER NEWS” and I had spent 2 days without writing any article in that category. When I published the article, it shows 2 days ago.

My theme developer simply said that I just remove it from settings but it is perfect for the site cause it increases page views.

I don’t know if you are still interested in this case but could you give me some advice or look at the code and see what’s causing this. When I remove it, then google indexes correctly. I have tried many things.

1. XML plugin ( yours and I see it does include date and time)

2.And even a Schema plugin.

Hi, it remains a complete mystery. Your code looks fine. There is a correct time stamp in both the page header (meta) and inside the <article> section. No idea why Google insist on grabbing the third <time> tag on that page, outside the <article> section.

That related posts section MORE IN TRANSFER NEWS, is that a plugin or custom code? Any possibility to wrap each of the items there in their own <article> tag? It should make it clearer to Google the time stamp is about that part only and not the whole page.

If not, maybe is there an option to remove the time/date in MORE IN TRANSFER NEWS? That would leave the links up for visitors while removing the option to Google trip over the <time> tags…

Hello,

No it’s a plugin but it’s a theme section to display more articles from the same category. No it doesn’t have option to turn off time or anything like that.

Thanks for all the help up to now.

Sorry I meant it’s not a plugin

Hmmm, in that case you’d need to contact the theme developer to ask if they either (1) add an option to not include date info or (2) do not use the <time> tags in these “more from this category” lists (meaning: still showing date/time but not with the dedicated timestamp markup) or (3) wrap these blocks in dedicated <article> tags.

I’m guessing obviously as I’m not a Google engineer, so you may want to verify if any of this makes sense by asking on https://support.google.com/googlenews/
Your case is an interesting enough to get attention and maybe some answers ??

I have the same issue. Sometimes the date is shown correctly, sometimes it does not, even during the same day. Did you find a solution for this problem?

Example:
https://www.ct100.ro/angajatii-primariei-constanta-au-donat-sange/
It was posted on April 19, it appers on April 12, in Google Search.
It appears OK in Google News.