Meta date appearing in Google descriptions

[flacnvinyl]

At some point over the past few months, dates have begun to appear in front of descriptions on our pages. This mostly affects sites on Pro. This happens regardless of whether you search while logged in our incognito. For POSTS I would expect that, but it should not be happening for pages.

We have tried disabling all plugins, changing from Yoast back to All In One SEO, and have also tried a few plugins that claim to omit publish date meta from pages. No change.

Yoast says the theme is outputting the date on the pages so I figured I would post here.

[paul.r]

Hi,

To better understand what you are referring to, please upload your screenshot to your site then provide us the link to it in Secure Note.

Thanks

[flacnvinyl]

Screenshot attached to secure note

[flacnvinyl]

Additionally here is the response from Yoast which may or may not help. Also, keep in mind we are only talking about PAGES. Posts having dates is a normal thing and one that is actually pretty critical to the new Google search algorithm updates geared toward delivering recent content. Pages are different and should not be outputting date stamps that get indexed by Google’s meta info.

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Thanks for contacting Yoast!

There is currently no functionality available in the Yoast SEO Premium plugin to add or remove a date in the search results. The date showing up in SERP is most often outputted by your theme so your best bet in removing the date stamp is to contact your theme developer.

Your other option is to use another plugin to remove the date but if you’re not open to using another plugin for that purpose, you can try manually removing the date yourself or ask a developer to remove the date from your theme. We have some example code here to use as a starting point.

We also have additional information on this topic here: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/date-appears-search-results/

[rad]

Hi there,

The theme does not add a date to pages and it has no post meta compared to posts. The date is being picked up from this code

And isn’t from the theme, perhaps it’s a custom code or from snippet plugins?

Thanks!

[flacnvinyl]

We will hunt and see how that is being applied.

[Prasant]

Hello @hatfieldmedia,

I have marked the code shared by my colleague in secure note.

Thanks.

[paulhoweyjr]

We are also trying to resolve this issue as well. Could you share the solution?

[rad]

@paulhoweyjr, the meta-data is being added to the page too and it could be from custom code or 3rd party plugin. The theme’s page type doesn’t have that meta-data. You may want to start a new thread about this issue and provide your site’s URL and maybe I could check where it’s coming from, though, I can’t guarantee any solution if this is being added by 3rd party plugins.

Thanks!