Hello,
Thanks for contacting Rank Math and apologies for any inconvenience this issue might have caused you.
I understand your concern is about the last modified date shown on the SERPs of posts/pages on your website.
According to this Google Search Central article, Google uses two methods to determine the dates your article was published or updated.
- The first is the visible date in the content.
- The other is the date in your structured data.
Unfortunately, this is something an SEO plugin cannot control.
Google usually picks and shows the date they see in the content itself and show it in the SERPs. Meaning, that if you have a visible date on your content, that will be picked up by Google and displayed.
Google gathers the dates in your content and then displays the one it thinks is most accurate. If it cannot determine which of the dates is correct, then it will guess.
You can resolve this issue by removing the published date from your content and structured data. That way, only your last modified and updated dates will be available to Google. You can refer to this guide on removing published dates from WordPress posts and URLs: https://rankmath.com/blog/remove-the-date-from-wordpress-post/
For more details, please refer to this article:
https://rankmath.com/kb/remove-dates-from-search/#how-google-find-date
We hope that helps, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need further help.
I removed the history as you mentioned, but should I change the permalinks too?
Another question, when I changed the structure of permanent links from the WordPress settings, the extension did not redirect the site to the new links.
Hello,
If you’re changing your blog post’s slug, then WordPress will automatically redirect the URL of your old post to the new one without any extra effort from your side.
However, the WordPress automatic redirection feature is limited only to posts and cannot be used to redirect pages, taxonomies, or CPTs.
If, for some reason, it doesn’t redirect automatically, you would need to manually redirect them. This KB may help:
https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-redirect-posts-after-changing-urls/
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.
Hello, I want your help, I want to change the structure of the permanent link, and redirect the old links to the links of the new links so that I do not lose traffic
Hello,
As we have mentioned before, WordPress will handle the redirection when you change the permalinks.
If somehow WordPress wasn’t able to implement the redirection, kindly share the old and the new permalink structure here with us so we can see if we can create a redirection for it.
Looking forward to helping you with this one.
Hello, I did all the steps and changed the permanent link
But I noticed a decrease in the ranking of the pages in the search engines
Is this normal and will the articles return to normal over time?
Hello,
Assuming you have established the redirection, there should only be minimal effect on the rankings.
If that is the case, you can give Google some time and wait for the rankings to come back but if the issue persists, we need to check the changes you have made.
Please note that changing permalinks for an already ranking website is risky but it is possible to do without affecting the ranking as long as you have correctly added the redirection.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
