When your blog posts are listed on Google search results (SERPs), a date stamp gets prepended to the meta description of the indexed page and these date stamps are known as Timestamp. There are are various theories regarding how and from where Google picks this date stamp (timestamp). Some bloggers/web masters 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. There is no any exact theory about timestamp but some webmaster think its beneficial while other thinks its not. I also thinks its beneficial but could be depends upon the method used.
Does Timestamp Beneficial for SERPs
showing on Search Results would be not. For a example, if you are looking for a tutorial on “How to Configure All in One SEO Plugin” than defiantly you would not like to click on a search result whose timestamp showing ” 18 Feb, 2006″. defiantly you would like to click on result either showing most recent dates or not showing any date.
Same phenomena applied on your blog Posts. Readers trust more on those posts which having date of posting associated with the post.
Sometimes its depends upon your niche, if your blog is a brand than nothing could be helpful for you more than trustworthy. Removing Timestamp from Google Search Results could be beneficial for you while you’re thinking to increase CTR rates. It has several advantages such as.
- It will increase the length of meta Description, means more words will be shown on your meta description.
- Visitors arriving from search engines will not discriminate the age of the content and will instead focus on the content itself, which should increase readership as well as time on site also.
Simply speaking if you are running a news site or writing about topics whose value is short lived then the adequate thing to do is to continue using dates. However if your traffic from search engines is suffering from users who refuse to visit an old article (and your topics are timeless) then you might want to consider removing the post date from your articles. So if you also think removing timestamp from search results could be beneficial for you, than you could do this by adapting three possible methods.
How to Remove Timestamp/ Date Stamp on WordPress?
There could be three possible methods to remove Timestamp from search results on WordPress, you can employ any method you would like. Remember these methods are for a WordPress.org blogs.
Remove Date Stamp code from your Posts:
This is the most easiest method to remove Date Stamp from both the places Your blog posts as well as Search Results. Some webmasters and bloggers are using this method and getting excellent results. But i personally don’t like this that’s why i will not recommend you this but the method is as.
- On WordPress your Index.php, Archive.php, Search.php and Single.php files having time stamp code. The code me be slightly different depends upon the theme you are using. The most common code is as mentioned below.
<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>So code on your Theme files will be similar to above. So in this method you just need to delete this code from each file listed above. This will remove timestamp from your blog posts as well as from Google Search Results also.
Use Image Timestamp instead of PHP timestamp:
Instead theme generated (PHP) Server side Timestamp use Image Timestamp. This will keep displaying the dates on your posts but will remove date stamp from Search Results. This could be done by converting date string to image. This method is not easy and have some complication when applied to WordPress. I will describe this method in detail on my upcoming posts.
Use Java script to Render Dates:
This is the most trusted method and also very simple. Follow the first method, but instead of deleting the PHP code you just have to replace that code with following code.
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">document.write("<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>");</script>If you want to your your current date format then kindly replace the piece of code in red color with yours.
This is most trusted method and this will not harms your current date format or style. Google will ignore that piece of information cause they do not scroll java scripts and so that they will not show the date stamp before your meta description in the SERPS. See the screenshot below.
Remember 2 things, first doing this not ensures that Google will be remove dates from each search result, but for newer post they will. Second one, the date prefix sometimes affects the readability of your page description. the change won’t be instant of course, but your root level page should update quickly while your remaining posts will update over the next few days/weeks depending on how often Google crawls your page.
