Removing date from blog post in search engine descriptions

I am trying to figure out how to remove the dates from search results for blog posts. We are using the blog posts to be able to have a bunch of searchable pages on the site. But the dates aren't actually relevant to anything on the page so I need to find out how to remove them. Does anyone have any insight?

Is the date posted in the blog posts? If so there is no control over the date in search results. If you hide the date in the posts it should not appear in search engine results. You can remove the date in edit mode. 

in 7.1, the blog settings are on the blog posts page, and on the individual post page.

1. Select the blog post or the page that shows all of the blog posts on it, and select Edit.
2. Hover in the top left corner or the page once in the edit window until you see the pencil icon.
3. Select the pencil icon to open up the blog page or post settings.
4. Here, you will see the options to show or hide different metadata (author, date, category) or none. 

Hi @jdenninger The site has more compelling issues. It looks to be a recent migration. There should be 301 redirects pointing old URLs to new URLs.

For example /biotech-laboratory should redirect to /laboratory. Or using your example above,  /directory/listing/alexander-demare-m-d should redirect to the new page for Dr. DeMare. That said, you'll likely want the doctor URLs to be more clear for positive user experience. So instead of /doctor-tz9t8 it might be /alexander-demare-m-d or similar. 

You can use free tools such as Google Search Console or Ahrefs traffic checker to see the impact the migration is having on visibility. We have articles with more info on website migrations.

On 6/1/2024 at 12:24 PM, derricksrandomviews said:

Is the date posted in the blog posts? If so there is no control over the date in search results. If you hide the date in the posts it should not appear in search engine results. You can remove the date in edit mode. 

in 7.1, the blog settings are on the blog posts page, and on the individual post page.

1. Select the blog post or the page that shows all of the blog posts on it, and select Edit.
2. Hover in the top left corner or the page once in the edit window until you see the pencil icon.
3. Select the pencil icon to open up the blog page or post settings.
4. Here, you will see the options to show or hide different metadata (author, date, category) or none. 

Hi, thanks for the suggestions. As far I can see the date is not posted anywhere on the page. Also, when I went to check the blog post page settings, the option to show date was hidden already.

Interestingly enough, for some of my posts, bing shows without that date in the SEO description, while google still does. 

For example:

Google:

Bing:

Not sure if that means this is more of an issue with google?

I had not thought about this before, but If GSC sees new content, it must post the date if it is not on the post. I went back and did a Google search for my site. Blog post excerpts in the search also show a date; I do not post it either. 

Here's some info on how Google handles dates: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/03/help-google-search-know-best-date-for

"Google shows the date of a page when its automated systems determine that it would be relevant to do so"

On 5/29/2024 at 3:06 PM, jdenninger said:

I am trying to figure out how to remove the dates from search results for blog posts.

All blog posts on Squarespace include a date in the page markup:

<time class="dt-published blog-meta-item blog-meta-item--date" datetime="28 janv." pubdate="" data-content-field="published-on">
  <span>28 janv.</span>
</time>

This will always be there, even when Show date has been toggled off, or CSS has been used to hide the date from visitors.

However, if you are using a Blog collection for non-blog content, and you want to remove the dates from search results, you can use inject some JavaScript to remove the date elements. This will then remove the dates from search results (over a period of time).