You may have noticed that the dates of WordPress posts are displayed in the description of search results, e.g.
While it may be useful having the date of the posts shown, it could detract visitors from clicking on your link because the date is weeks, months or years old, even though the article may well be highly relevant. I know from personal experience I’ve chosen a link over another simply because the date was more recent. Naturally, you think the more recent the post, the better, but that’s not always the case.
So how do you go about remove the date from your posts?
Through WordPress CMS, under Appearance > Editor, in the file index.php look for the line of code:
<?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?>
Removing this from the file will remove any instance of the date on the posts. Also, look in single.php, archives.php and page.php and anywhere else the date may show up and remove the above line of code.
the code as it's shown in my index.php
Is there any way to leave it as part of the post that the visitor sees but keep it away from the meta data?
Interesting tip!
Kimberly
Hi Kim, that’s an interesting question, thanks! I asked Ben, a colleague of mine who said this can be achieved by using PHP’s GD image function to display the date as an image which search engines will not pick up. Found this piece of code on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2217429/display-image-based-on-date-in-php:
< ?php// Create a 75*15 image
$im = imagecreate(75, 15);
// White background and black text
$bg = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
// Write the date at the top left, offset by 2px to the right
imagestring($im, 5, 2, 0, date("m/d/y"), $textcolor);
// Output the image
header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>
Alternatively, you can try using Javascript to display the date but there’s a chance that Google may still be able to read it.
I’ll have a play around with it and see whether this is the case and maybe write an update post on it.
Julie
Interesting post Julie – and a good point about the date. I think that this increase the importance of the post title as if this meets the query perfectly, then you should still get a click!
And you still have dates in the comments on posts, they need to go as well as Google is using them now.
That’s true, I should remove them really!