We faced the problem that Google displayed the initial publish date of all our pages and blog posts for our website in front of the Google search results:
As we didn’t want these dates to appear in the Google search results, especially for normal website pages, we’ve searched for a possibility to remove them. After some research we found out, that the HTML time tag was responsible for these dates:
<time datetime="2019-09-24T05:43:08+00:00">09.24.2019</time>
When this tag is contained in the source code of the page, then the Google bot parses it and adds it to the search results.
To remove the <time> tag you can e.g. try the following WordPress plugins:
In our case our theme offered a configuration option to disable the <time> tag globally for all post types.
If you have existing pages where you want the date to disappear in Google search results, then tell Google in the Google Search Console to reindex the affected page. If you want all your pages to be reindexed by Google because you‘ve removed the <time> HTML tag globally for all pages of your website (that‘s what we did), then resubmit your page sitemap in the Google Search Console. This will tell Google to reindex all your pages and the dates will disappear eventually.
