Some of you may have noticed that when your blog (or individual post) is listed on Google search results (SERPs), a date stamp gets prepended to the meta description of the indexed page (see the image below). There are are various theories regarding how and from where Google picks this date stamp. Some believe that it is the time stamp of the last post on your blog, where as a few others believe that it’s the date on which your site is last indexed. Regardless of the reason, sometimes this extra date field can be a bit annoying for some of you and in this post let me explain how you can remove the same.
Ways to remove date from search results
First of all, let me tell you that not every blogger or webmaster face this issue. And this doesn’t quite depend on your blog theme as well – i.e. Blogs using the same theme and layout may or may not have this issue. However, for those who have completely disabled post dates, this may not happen at all. And hence the fixing process starts based on that behavior because in most cases, Google seems to pick the date from the content of the page or your blog post.
There are basically two ways of removing this date in the Google search result or meta description.
1. Use image based dates instead of the usual theme (PHP) generated server side time stamp. In this case, you have to convert the date string to images and hence it may not be very easy to create the image styles that exactly match your theme. Also, you may have to change it every time you change your styles.
2. Use client side logic (javascript) to render the dates so that when Google picks the page, it doesn’t quite read whatever (date) is there between the script tags. I prefer this method.
(Third option obviously is to remove the dates totally but you might want your post dates to be present there)
So how do we fix it? Just follow the simple steps as given below for a WordPress blog. For any other blog platform/website, you may similar logic.
- Open your theme’s index.php file.
- Search for the place where you display the time – usually a call to something like the_time(‘F j, Y’) method
- Replace that logic with Javascript. i.e. paste the following code instead of the time (Please type in the code as I have actually pasted an image of the code snippet here)
This makes sure that the server side date rendering is avoided and hence Google wouldn’t list it next time it index your blog’s home page.
If you want to do the same for individual posts, repeat the above step for your single.php file. Please note that existing posts may take some time before the date from their description field is removed. To enforce the changes, you may want to republish the post as well.
Update: Aug 15
Sometimes the above script still doesn’t work on single posts. In that case you may use a combination of javascript and PHP to render your date, as mentioned in the example below.
[Click image to enlarge]
Pros and cons of the date stamp on Meta description
If you are a regular blogger who makes one post (or more) a day, you may not really mind having a date prefixed on search results of your homepage. However, if you post once a week or so, like me, you may not want to show that your last update was a week back because it may affect your click-through rate from search. The same logic is applicable for individual posts as well. I mean, nobody will click a SERP link, if the post date/year shows something like 2008.
Also, the date prefix sometimes affects the readability of your page description (usually the marketing punchline) and at times truncates it as well.
Hope this tip was useful for your blog’s SEO!
Happy SEO!
My sites have the time stamp and are not blogs at all. I can’t figure out what causes google to put in the dates on my descriptions. Any ideas? Also my other site design http://www.sensationsskin.com has it!
@dg, Google pick it from the content. In your case, your homepage has a date in the string ‘Tina 07/02/2009 on Google’ and that date is picked to display on your Google search meta description.
Try removing that date, add some new content (or reshuffle the content to effect some change in the eyes of Google). Make sure that the sitemap is updated to reflect the homepage changes.
Hopefully in the next crawl the date will disappear from search.
Hi Ajith,
When I search “golflogix” in Google Search engine, In the SERP results bring with date on the description field like, http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=golflogix&aq=f&aqi=g9g-s1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=8631cdd35a4d476d for http://www.golflogix.com website.
We need to remove the date from the Meta description. Any solution?
@michael,
In your case, Google is picking the date from the Terms of Use page which is in fact inline with your index page using div tags. You need to remove the statement ‘This Terms of Use Agreement was last updated on May 1, 2010′ to make it work. After removing, ping Google and you should be fine within a few days. Let me know if it worked!
@Ajith,
If we can changing the date format from “May 1, 2010” to “5/1/10”. whether this issue will fix? Need your suggestion.
@Michael, I tried various date formats and it didn’t work till today. However, I have now arrived at a new solution (mix or Javascript and PHP) and it seems to work for my new post
I shall update the post accordingly..
That may be true and I’ll try to make your adjustment suggestions, but what about http://www.ProCollage.com? I get the date stamp on that one as well! Thanks for the help and info.
I didn’t see any date stamp on relevant searches on that site. Which keyword did you search for?
Thanks Ajith, will check this.
i think the date stamp has something to do with when google last index the page. nope, i’m probably wrong. Can’t help you here guys.
Thanks for sharing the tricks Ajith! Nevertheless, I don’t find any disadvantage of showing the date stamp if we update our blog at least twice a week or so. But as you said, that might be good for blog which updates only once a week, that might affect the click through rate.
Thanks for sharing Ajith!
Regards,
Lee
@Lee, yes. The date is not harmful for a blog that regularly gets updated. However, if you take out the date, the SERP structure looks neat..
That’s seriously important to me..Haven’t implemented your trick right now but I really want to get rid of this thing..Will just try the trick after this comment
Update: I implemented it and it does works..Hats off to you man.
Thanks for this trick..
You are welcome buddy… Let me try to help ajeet now.
Thanks for the post ajith
can i remove this for my blogspot blog
@ajeet, it’s possible to remove the date for the search description of any website or blog. For blogger platform, you have to find the right place in your theme file to modify the script. Unfortunately, I am not an expert in blogger themes to suggest where exactly you have to modify. I shall try to figure it out.
ok thanks for reply
Thanks for this tips. I’ve observed the date stamp in SERP result and I didn’t like it especially when the post is older than twelve months. It can easily discourage the intending visitor as people tend to prefer fresh information. That means I’ll be denied the opportunity to prove that I have something to offer just because it was written long ago.
It is nice to learn how to go about avoiding that. Thanks for sharing. Kudos
@Naija, you are welcome.. Yes, this would increase the click-through for older post when dates are removed. Unfortunately, nothing much can be done about those very old posts that google is not updating the index for.
Great post ajith,
I just now checked my individual post on SERP. It shows date.
Let me try your 2nd method.
Let me know how it turned out to be
Great post. Thanks from Germany.
Great.
Will try now and see if it works – thanks
Hi Ajith,
i have the same problem and,
i want to ask you if this date in description can affect my position in Google.
Rob,
I would think that, it shouldn’t affect your SERP position unless the date stamp causes any good part of your description getting truncated.
my listing shows a date of 11/19/09. this date is nowhere on my site, and my website has been updated plenty since that date. I do have a blog but this is not the page being references, it’s my main site. Keywords that show this are cat sitting los angeles, as well as many many others…
@Rita, it doesn’t show any date on home page search results.
Are you sure that google doesn’t grab info from RSS and merges it with your post content?
@Merlinox, it’s possible. Because my logic now doesn’t work on single posts
However, for the homepage it works like a charm
Hi Ajith, thanks for this. So do you mean that if I do the single.php changes it won’t work?
@Staggered, for Single.php, I have provided a new script (combo of PHP + javascript) and that’ ones working for me right now. Please read the updated part in the post.
Ajith,
I deleted any references to time in the php code for this site, but I’m still getting a date in the description. Also, I’ve changed the blog title in WordPress to be more SEO friendly, from “The Homepage of Emma Graves Fitzsimmons” to just “Emma Graves Fitzsimmons.” This was almost a week ago. I’m still getting “The Homepage of Emma Graves Fitzsimmons” and the date (Aug. 14, 2010) in the site description. How long until the Google bots crawl this site again? Should I resubmit the site to Google?
@Gerry, it takes a few days or even weeks at times based on how often Google crawls your site. It crawls faster when sites are frequently updated. Btw, if you have a sitemap.xml (I couldn’t find one) you can submit it once again via Google webmaster tools.
Will try this option.
I have xml feeds and sitemaps with timestamps, should I remove these dates too?
Thank you! Worked for me within hours.
Damn! I have tried both the scripts but still the date is coming up in my SERP results. :-/
Everytime I come up with a new script, it works for two-three posts and then Google will find a workaround to get the date
Sorry for that man. But at least your homepage must be looking good in SERP?
thanks for the information, good post!
i will try your second method!
Regards,
Sandra
Great article, but what do you think about USING this feature instead of removing it: display the CURRENT date by using a PHP command on pages/posts where you normally don’t use a date (eventually using colors/text-indent trick to grab less attention)…
I’m sure your click-through will move up as you always have the current post date
had this problem recently with a few sites due to the HTML5 web semantics we were using. Removing the dates may make your description look good but will it change your rankings?
@Blair, based on my experience, it doesn’t affect any rankings – my well ranked pages are in tact on SERPs.
Hi, after searching aimlessly all over for a solution I came across your blog.
I use thesis theme for my site. When I navigate to the index.php file as stated in your post, this is all I have there;
/**
* Cue the star of the show…
*
* @package Thesis
*/
thesis_html_framework()
At this point I am lost and dont know absolutely what to click on. Can you please shed more light on my situation here.
Thanks
Sorry for the delayed reply. I am not familiar with the thesis framework but there must be some file where those functions must be residing in and you have to edit. Please take help from any thesis forum.
Hey, did you eventually figure out how to remove the date stamp from the Google SERP?
If so, please let us know how to do it using thesis. Thanks.
Hi,
I was looking for this exact issue on WordPress.org forum.
So, do we replace only this code:
the_time(‘F jS, Y’)
or this code:
I didn’t want to try it before I make sure by asking you.
@Nail, that’s right… Hope you have already done it. In some cases, it doesn’t work for individual posts but mostly work for the homepage.
Ajith – thanks for a useful post… did not know enough about js to be able to do it myself…
sorry for being ignorant but to make this clear , where do we place the code?
index.php and single.php respectively at the places mentioned in this post.
Great post. Thanks from Spain
I’ve read all the posts and answers — great insights!
I recently rewrote my site’s Descriptive Meta Tag and it was indexed by Google, but htere is still a date stamp. I’ve scoured the website for this date, thinking that I could just remove it from the text, but can’t find it anywhere. I looked at the Page Source code and didn’t see it there, but I don’t know HTML, anyway, so I probably couldn’t have fixed it in the code. Any ideas for me?
It is like “The Big Brother” of George Orwell.
Unless your website is too old, I think there is no problem showing the date stamp.
I had no realise about this label, but from now, I will do.
I hope to be able of configure all the settings with the new Google display of search results.
Regards!!
thanks for the tips and tricks. in my case i delete all the wp date function .
Currently Google is pulling the snippet from any one or combination of the following areas:
1. META description tag (although Google doesn’t use contents to determine relevancy).
2. First ALT text found on the page.
3. First text found on the page (which may be a heading tag, body text, etc.).
4. Additional heading tags on the page.
5. Additional body text found on the page.
6. Additional ALT text on the page.
7. Navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page (which is rarely a relevant description of a site!).
8. Copyright information at the bottom of the page.
9. Wherever the keyword phrase is found.
I am using Arras theme and I dont find anything named time or date in my index.php or home.php file
Can you figure out what needs to be done to change the Date from appearing in Search Results while Searching for the root keyword for my home page
@Rahul, since I do not know your theme specific files, I cannot say where exactly your date stamp is rendered from.
Ajith,
My site shows the stamp of Dec. 22, 2008 and I have no clue where this is coming from…. and while the site is HistoricOccoquan.com, 2008 isn’t all that historic and I feel it makes my site look like it hasn’t been updated in a while… when it actually gets updated frequently..
Any clues as to how to remove this date is extremely appreciated…
Bry
Bryan,
This particular date is not there anywhere on your source code. You need to check the relevance of that date in your sitemap (which I couldn’t access). I am tempted to believe that that’s the date when you changed your meta tags (keywords, description,…) last. Can you try changing your meta description a little bit and ping google once? In a few days time, I believe this should at the least change it to a 2011 date. Please let me know if it works. You can change only the meta description words for the time being.
I am seeing the date for this post of yours, though you had used the combination. The only difference is the SERPS are showing the date as 3 May 2010. I am not sure from where google is picking 3 from.Was that the date when this page got indexed?
please delete the earlier comment and this note as there were a few typos in it.
Rajesh, This post never had a date stamp in Google serps for the first few weeks. But as I mentioned in this post, everytime I put a fix, after a few weeks Google seem to pick the pattern. This time, I am tempted to believe that it picked the date from the first comment date stamp. Perhaps, the same javascript should be put in comment date fields as well.
Nice trick. I already imlemented in my wordpress based website. And works for most of posts published. If you serch something in google (for instance, parkour), my web page (vidaoutdoor.com) appears without time stamp. But when the post has just one comment or trackback, the time stamps is there (for instance, running).
The time is takken, as you noticed, from comments. And I couldn’t find the time command in my template. It probably appears in core files, which is other issue…
Did anybody find a solution for time stamp from commentaries?
Hi Ajith,
Can you help me where to put the code. Below is my index.php. Im afraid I will get mistake.
Original Code:
div class=”postmetaleft”>
| Filed Under
Thank You
edsel
@Edsel, your code is truncated in the comment. I just sent you a mail, please check it.
Hi Ajith
my listing shows a date of 6 Dec 2010. this date is nowhere on my site in the sorce, cau u help me to remove it?
tnx
That’s a tough one
The only number I can think of as source for date is the Reg number in your footer i.e. J40/12625/2001. Looks like Google has dug out the 126 out of that somehow. Could you try removing it for the time being (or put an image for that number instead) and check again in 5-6 days?
Thanks Ajith, will check this. One question: The date has no relevance to SEO?
Hello everyone,
I must say I really like this by Google. I always click on the results which have the date is it gives a clear indication of how recent and, maybe, relevant the page is to your query.
On my page the date is not from a php code and actually not from any of the things Bombas de Agua listed. My guess it is simply pickup up the word date and post the latest.
In any case, I LIKE IT.
Ciao,
Karl Manuel
Why not just remove the date code altogether? I removed my “” code and poof, date is gone. Any thoughts?
hello Ajith
i was trying it but i get a parse error when i do that.
the code used for the index makes no parse error, but the date is not shown on any post summary on the index page.
and the one used for the single post has parsing error.
i also dont know if it worked, how much time i need to test that?
im using wordpress 3.2.1
Hi
i am using twentyten theme, where can i find this peace of code to replace.
Thanks
my site (transformerland.com) has a really old date in the search results (2004) for keyphrase ‘transformers toys’. I don’t have any text ’2004′ anywhere in my index page.
I’ve completely re-designed my site, altered the index page, have dynamically changing content, and a ‘latest update’ note that is always at most 2 weeks old…what am I doing here to make google show such an old date?
@Matt,
Google is taking it from your home page text => “03/30/04 – The Energon section has been updated with a sleek new look and crystal-clear images!”
Try to rephrase it without all numbers in the date – Something like on ‘Energon section was updated during first quarter (Mar 30) of 2004′, if that’s what you meant.
Google seem to treat it like a time stamped newslog on your site.
My homepage doesnt have this date, but all my other pages have a date in the SERP. How to delete these? It are all pages, not blogposts..
I checked your site. Google seems to be treating it like a news site and taking the date (8 nov for now) from your “Laatste nieuws” section. Try removing that widget, and probably after another page addition, everything should go.
Thanks, I deleted that widget/block and now its all good, thanks a lot Ajith!
Hi Ajith,
I tried your suggestions in your main post but the sections arnt included in my theme page.php
My homepage does not have a date on SERP but all other pages do – any idea how to remove this?
I checked your site. The date on sub-pages seems to be originating from your ‘Company News’ footer widget. Either remove that widget or you have to change the part where it’s rendering the date. i.e. change that part of the date to javascript based date. Once it’s corrected and by the time you submit the next news, the dates should go off I believe.
Worked great, thanks!
Thanks Ajith,
The news section is not a widget some I have the option of either removing it or change the part where the date is rendering (I am struggling to find this so far) but will let you know the outcome.
After months searching and investigating for a possible solution for time stamp from commentaries, I finally gave up. If you hide it with javascript or any other trick, Google will display the first date that it find or register. If your posts don’t have any date, in SERP will be displayed the Google’s indexation date. Matt Cutts explains it clearly in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp#p/search/0/fpbpfjzEBAM
And I am almost sure that triying to fool Google bot with this kind of tricks could, at the end, seriously damage your pagerank. After all, hiding the date to bots but showing it to readers is a kind of cloacking, which is a black-hat seo techinque penalized by Google. And since Google is able to read javascritp code, it’s for sure it can detect and mark the trick.
My advice is don’t use this kind of tricks. I tried this one for three months and, in that period, I couldn’t boost my pages to first place on SERPs. But since I stopped to use it, my site (vidaoutdoor.com) gone rapidly to top. All my snippets in the first place shows, however, the time stamp. You can check it for yourselves here, here or here.
Hope this could help
Ego, It’s not a blackhat technique. We produce content and we can decide whether it has to be date-stamped. I wouldn’t like Google putting a timestamp on my valuable description text anyhow.
Of course it is a blackhat seo technique, and its name is cloacking. Your decision of google not to date-stamp your site’s SERP snippet works (when it does) thanks to hiding content to google bot, which is precisely the definition of cloaking… Take a look at Matt Cutts again:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp?feature=g-user-a#p/search/5/wBO-1ETf_dY
If you think like that even the usage of Javascript itself is black hat. C’mon, the bots needn’t worry about what’s going to show to the webbrowser that varies hugely in terms of technology and devices where as bots are in the same old text world. We are NOT cloaking a link here nor are we embedding keywords and hence I would think that it’s a safe approach. Anyhow, there are n number of things that the dumb bots don’t see or ignore – including flash content, javascript, activex content etc.
By the way though Google is the leading search engine, they are just one of them
The game can change anytime going forward.
It seems I didn’t made myself clear. I do not think that the usage of javascript is a black hat seo technique. As I said repeatidly, showing one thing to search bots (a post without date) and another one to readers (the publication’s date) is cloacking, using javascript or another resource. In other words, you can do cloacking with javascript (like in this case), but not all use o javascript is cloacking. Only the javascript used to show one thing to bots and another one to people is cloacking.
Cloacking is simply to show one content to bots and other one to human. So, when you says you’re not cloacking because aren’t hidden a link or embedding a keyword, you’re not demostrating that this trick is not cloacking. And, of course, it’s not true that the “dumbs bot” don’t see javascript. Google bot reads javascript since 2009.
And, finally, maybe it’s me, but it really seems unnecesary and a little bit trivial the mention of google as a non-just-one-and-only search engine… Of course Google is just one of many search engines. But this post is about (and I quote the title) “…to remove Date stamp from Google SERP…” snippet. In this context, does the other search engines really matter here?
Thanks for your views.
Btw, ‘Google is just one’ comment was in the context of the unfair terms they are setting for webmasters.
(Of course, the article is dedicated to Google SERP dates alone)
One more thing… Here’s Matt Cutts’ video explaining what is cloaking:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp?feature=g-user-a#p/search/0/QHtnfOgp65Q
Hello,
Thank you for this helpful information. I am trying to figure out where google is pulling the date stamp for my site http://www.acaciawoodcarvings.com.
When searching for african art, the date stamp says Nov. 11, 2010. Do you have any idea where this date is coming from? Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Hmm… Not sure where is this coming from. Could be prior to your last update (or redirect to new sales page).
Thanks for taking a look at it. What do you mean by redirect to new sales page?
I was just mentioning that it may have picked that date from (1) sitemap date for the last update of the homepage or (2) the update before your redirect to new servlet took place. Check the sitemap.xml data for this particular date.