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I noticed on a few recent projects the Date is displaying in the Meta Description for all Custom Post Types and Taxonomies in WordPress. I was always under the impression the Date would usually show for 'Posts', which has always made sense. Then for Pages and Taxonomies - which would normally be evergreen content in most scenarios NO date would appear when seeing the snippet on a SERP.

I use the Genesis Framework and Yoast SEO for most projects and have looked into seeing if the date showing in the meta description is related to the Parent Theme or Plugin and it doesn't seem to be.

Yoast say the date is produced naturally by Wordpress.

I'm slightly confused though as I have never had this issue until recently, I was interested in seeing if anyone else has noticed this and if there is a solution to removing the date from all CPTs and Taxonomies?

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  • Do you mean that the meta description in your HTML contains the date? Meta description is not something WordPress generates, it must be done by some plugin, not sure how we can help you on this.
    – cybmeta
    Feb 18, 2016 at 7:55
  • @cybmeta I'm not sure how I can expand further on what I have already said above, here is a screenshot of the Front-Page and a Page appearing on a Serch Engine Results Page. (s27.postimg.org/rhjy477n7/…). You can see the Date appearing before the Meta Description for the About Us page. This is the case for every Page and Taxonomy pages which are indexed by Google, the only page which doesn't show the date is the Front Page.
    – Tom25
    Feb 18, 2016 at 10:36
  • Well, that is not meta deacription; meta description is HTML code in your site. If you don't want dates in Google results, just remove any date reference in the code of your pages. It is the only thing you can do, and wait to a Google update ....
    – cybmeta
    Feb 18, 2016 at 10:53

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If anyone else encounters this, check your source code and try and find the date in question to see where it's being inputted, Googlebot normally finds these dates there.

It turned out the Googlebot was picking up a date in the footer of my site, via the WordPress Latest Posts Widget, where I had selected the option to feature the Post date. Resulting in this date showing in the source code of every page throughout the site.

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