Remove Date from Google Search Snippet - Hentry Removal

Remove Date from Google Search Snippet – Hentry Removal

Web Design, Wordpress Plugin, Wordpress Tutorials 0 Comments

This short tutorial will show you how to remove the date snippet or date stamp on Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) like the above image. For some people, date snippet in Google search results does not seems to bother them much. For us, since we did not update our blog posts so frequent, it is better to hide the post date just to keep it fresh all the time.

So here are 3 reasons to hide the date snippet on Google SERP.

Keep the content fresh & relevant in search results listings.
To avoid losing the click juice because people like me always go for the article with most recent date.
Somehow, somewhere..the date snippet also showing on Pages instead of Posts. You don’t need it for pages, seriously. This one is theme dependent.

So in our case, the date snippet was showing on every pages listed on Google. We suspect that there is something wrong somewhere in our Yoast SEO setting or Theme Settings.

We have tried every possible solutions on Google search for “how to remove date from google snippet” but none fix the issue. Disabled the “show date” in Yoast and in our theme options, reindex, but it is still the same.

Here is how we got it fixed

Run the Google Structured Data Testing Tool on the page/post url

2. On the results page, check every item that appeared on the right column to find anything that is related to date.

3. We checked on the “hentry” and there it shows the ‘updated’ date. And on the left is where the hentry class being used on the page. What is hentry?

4. Since there is no settings on how to disable this ‘hentry’ class, so we searched on WordPress plugins repo and found this old plugin: Hatom/hentry Remover. This old plugin has not been updated for 2 years. We downloaded it to pc and check the codes, nothing much that can possibly compromise our site. So we decided to install it. BEWARE: We won’t be responsible if it did break your site or any loses by following this tutorial. Use it at your own risk. You have been warned.

5. This plugin was meant to fix some sort of errors in Google Webmaster Tool. But for us, once installed, we log into our Google Webmaster Tool panel to force Google Bot to re-index the page in order to get fast result whether it’s working or not. If you don’t have access to the tools, you can simply just wait for Google to crawl the page again in maybe 2-3 days….or weeks..

6. Finally, once re-indexed. The date snippet had gone. Mission accomplished.