I am trying to remove dates from Google Search engines along with descriptions that came after updating to this theme. I already disabled date option from theme panel post options. Please tell me what should i do further to disable it completely so that search engines will not crawl the date and show it in search engines.
Thanks
Hi,
It’s not easy to prevent the search engines to get the date from posts, you would have to locate all tags from the theme files and WordPress also, you could get a freelancer to do this for you or you could try to find a solution online.
Also I’m not sure if not showing the date of your posts it’s an Google call, you could do a search on this for more info. Also you can use this tool to check what Google gets from your site.
This is an example for our demo site, you can see that it dose not show the date even though we hadn’t made any changes to prevent that. http://screencast.com/t/61gpPqkjzxc
Hope this helps!
Thanks
Thanks a lot, Lucian. I got you and i checked my site and it’s not showing dates as well. I think google already indexed my site with dates and will remove them by time. Thanks for suggesting me using that tool.
Note that dates are usually found in your XML sitemap also, as date of creation and last time updated. And Google likely adds a date added to their index.
True Christopher. So how can we prevent it. It’s necessary for some type of websites. Is there any way to edit it. I am using Yoast Plugin and sitemaps. Can’t we comment out it.
You might be able to do that in the sitemap files for Yoast (and you’d need to buy the PRO version to get any support from them); however keep in mind without a date and last update many search engines would have no idea if you update/change content anymore (could be wrong). It also wouldn’t change the “date added” to the Google index which they keep track of, and they could also pull date from when it’s first shared in social media… which kind of means it’s not practical to hide when something was first created.
If you’re building a new client site, and doing redirects from old static pages to new fancy ones; you lose no equity for how long the site has been online with Google, etc., as they look at the site URL + content + indexed date. So, changing location via 301 just tells them where the NEW version is, and you lose none of the equity from a 10 year old page. That may not be the concern, but I’m guessing on one possible scenario there 🙂
Thanks Christopher. The information you provided is exactly what i am looking for. Thanks for helping out tagdiv community.
Always my pleasure. I won’t have as much time starting in Sept., but recently I’ve had some spare time to hang out here while “waiting for stuff to happen” on my other monitor, which I have to keep an eye on (web server updates, site backups, test of moving to SPDY framework for speedup of https, test of https speed, blah blah).
Glad to be able to help. 🙂
I’m actually moving my old “article” area on our main business site from 15 year old static shtml pages to a blog/article area on the site with wordpress + newspaper, and will be doing the 301 redirects in this particular scenario myself. I already did this on our site for some duplicate content, where we had some stuff in /services/ and then in /writing_services/ and now everything is in services. Pain. But Google is smart enough to know the site is still there the page is still there, it’s just moved, thanks to the 301 function.
