Some of my articles are being indexed with wrong timestamp by Google

Hi, some of my articles are being indexed by Google with different timestamp.

For example, in this screenshot http://www.screencast.com/t/SrKHgCXPK, the first article from the results was published like 19 hours ago, but in the Google search appears like it was published 2 days ago, and in this way was indexed from the first hour after being published. Instead of showing “one hour ago”, it showed “two days ago”.

I already asked the host, and they told me that the hour of the server is fine, also in WordPress I have the correct dates, but someone suggested me in the Google forums that my hentry schema is missing the (optional) “published” property [http://microformats.org/wiki/hentry], so Google tries to understand the correct date by looking at the post content. Just wanted to know if this can be the problem and if there is a solution for it, because it happens with 10% of my articles.

Have a great day and happy holidays! 🙂

• This topic was modified 10 years by Watashi10.

You should be using a Google sitemap which should show the proper timestamp and last updated time. You can look at your XML sitemap to see if the correct values are there.

Also note, if referring to Google / Google News, sometimes they have the timestamp off if the GMT/EST specifier is wrong, or the “local PHP time” is offset on your local domain.

Usually a simple php script to echo current time can help determine if your php local time on domain is actually correct and not offset from “real time” — meaning we had this issue once where server time was 9am EST, WordPress time was 9am EST but actual local php time was 8am PST.

Might not help, just food for thought 🙂

Hey Chris,

Thank you for your answer, I already use the Yoast XML sitemap, and the timestamp of that article is correct. The strange thing is that this doesn’t happen with all my articles, just with some of them.

Then likely Google having hiccups … they do this from time to time, often end of month, or when doing a major backup/re-index. I see this from time to time and go whaaaa? Google not perfect, by any stretch. 🙂

OH, they also can get confused if any of your story headlines are “identical” to other headlines on the web already, due to then thinking it’s variation of same “old” story they already have captured.

I see, all of that is possible and maybe I shouldn’t worry too much. As long as the users can find my articles online it’s great. Maybe some of them will think that my news website it has some sort of premonition powers and they’ll visit it more often.

Any way, thank you very much for your time 🙂

For some reason that makes me want to create an “april fools” psychic publishing plugin for WP …. 😉

Chris, I would like to ask you something.

Do you know if there is any way to add links to the words of the captions in Newspaper’ featured images? I can’t find any solution for this. For the other images I can add links in captions after inserting them in the post, but for the featured images I have no way because they don’t show in the posts. I wouldn’t like to change the style of the posts, maybe use some code or plugin.

What do you think?

I understand, thank you Bogdan. That is what I wanted to know, if there is another way besides using html to insert a link in the caption text.

Happy holidays!