Stop Date Post Published Showing in SERPs - Show Modified Instead

[Darth]

Anyone know, short of nuking all traces of the datePublished from the source, rendered HTML, schema etc, of a way to force Google to show the updated date in SERPs instead of published? dateModified will obviously be in the schema and rendered HTML labelled as the modified or updated date.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Anyone know, short of nuking all traces of the datePublished

That’s the answer. Google still seems to choose a date at random in many cases, even ones from inside the content (such as historical dates). I quit worrying about it and they did eventually seem to sort it out. But back when I was experimenting with freshness, the only way was to nuke the publish date from everywhere.

 

[Bladhark]

I use this Wordpress plugin - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-last-modified-info/ and it works pretty good.

However, I use it in combination with SEOPress, but I don't think that's mandatory.

 

[zelch]

I use this Wordpress plugin - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-last-modified-info/ and it works pretty good.

However, I use it in combination with SEOPress, but I don't think that's mandatory.

does it work well to generate that date in the serp result?

 

[Bladhark]

does it work well to generate that date in the serp result?

Yes it shows the last updated date.

But you have to watch out that other plugins are not interfering with it. As said, I'm using SEOPress, and that plugin has an option to turn off the dates to show in the serps completely. I can imagine other similar plugins have such options as well.