Yesterday, we have discussed about removing dates from old posts in your WordPress site. Today in this tutorial we will be showing you how you can hide dates on Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Hide My Dates is the new WordPress plugin that uses a CSS for hack to show dates only on your website to you visitors. But at the same time Google takes it for the “title” parameter of a “span” element and hence doesn’t consider it to be a part of your page content. The result is, your post date is not shown in Google search snippet.
The plugin requires that the date in your theme be rendered directly though WordPress date functions.
How To Hide Dates From Google Search Results Page?
Install and activate Hide My Dates in your WordPress site. After activation visit your admin area dashboard Settings -> Hide My Dates page and check your options for hiding date on Google Search.
The plugin has certain limitations like it will not work if dates in your WordPress theme are not shown through native date function of WordPress. Like it doesn’t works for in Twenty Eleven, Twenty Twelve and later themes.
There are some WordPress themes only show the date of the last post modification. You can hide it from Google by checking its option on plugin’s admin page.
It also provides you option for hiding dates in post comments. Likewise when Google doesn’t finds post date, it looks up for first comment and takes the date from there. Hence, hiding comment creation dates also becomes important.
Alternatively, you may also go for Date Exclusion SEO plugin, although this plugin hasn’t been updated from over two years but works fine with new WordPress versions.
The plugin allows you to turns off date information after a specified number of days or immediately. You can also remove dates from category, tag, front pages individually and there are various other options you can manage from your admin area dashboard Settings -> Date Exclusion SEO page.
After you have set up this plugin options, you can preview your content on search results from Google rich snippet testing tool.