Hello,
I’m having an issue with how my homepage appears in Google search results while using the Newspaper theme.
Google is automatically showing a date label like “4 days ago —” before my homepage meta description/snippet.
Since my homepage is not a news article, I do not want any date information to appear there.
Could this be caused by Newspaper theme schema markup, article metadata, or structured data settings? How can I prevent Google from showing the “4 days ago —” label before the homepage snippet?
Thanks.
Google Search Results:
Yoast Schema:
Hi,
The publish date and the modified date are loaded by Yoast https://prnt.sc/CBkav9yy22d8 and from what I see there’s no option within the plugin to disable them specifically. At least that’s what I’m finding in such topics https://wordpress.org/support/topic/remove-datemodified-and-datepublished-schema/
I searched more and it looks like there is a way to remove the dates from the schema that Yoast loads https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66806184/remove-datepublished-and-datemodified-from-yoast-seo-plugin-generated-article-sc
For me this code from here worked -> https://pastebin.com/rPRpfdvd I added it in the theme functions file, but it can be loaded with a code plugin as well. You could try it if disabling those dates for the homepage is what you want to do.
The results may vary. Either the date will disappear from the search results page after some time, or Google may try to find a different date in the code of the page and display that one. This last possibility may be worse, as it could just display random date from the page if there is one.
Thank you!
Okay, but why is Google showing a date on the homepage specifically? I also use the Yoast SEO plugin on my other websites, and their homepages do not display a date in Google search results.
I can’t explain what Google does unfortunately. They say that if a date is available in the page, it might show in the search results, if this information is considered useful https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/publication-dates Since you don’t want this to happen you could try that code. Maybe the date will not show up anymore eventually.
Thank you!
