Google shows date in the SERPS for the homepage
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Hi SEO's
we've build a site and our now trying to rank it but it won't go up despite of regular new unique content and a higher DA than most competitors. All tools like MOZ en Yoast SEO show green lights so we're kinda out of ideas right now.
Till we saw the date in the SERPS for the meta description. This gives us the idea that Google sees it as a post and not as a page which might explain the low ranking. However there are no technical causes we can think off for Google to show the date. Any ideas on this matter? Could it be that Yoast SEO is causing this even although we tell it not to show dates?
Love to hear from you!
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We've took the date out of the code. I think it might have an indirect effect on the ranking, but off course we're also focussing on content and authority.
Thanks for the reply
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Hey Roderick,
It looks like the dates are no longer showing in the SERPs (at least on my end). Either way, I wouldn't get too hung up on the dates contributing to lower rankings, it's the likely the result of many other factors. Sorry this answer isn't more helpful but I would focus on other areas your site can improve on from an SEO perspective rather than the date.
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Sitemaps yes, robots.txt correctly yes, no strange things in Search Console and Analytics, preferred domain set, platform WordPress: www.villavibes.nl we (removed the date from the latest blog post now so maybe it doesn't show up anymore if you check).
Don't know if the date would have a direct impact on ranking but indirect people may click on it less as they think it's a post instead of a page..
Thanks for your reply!
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Do you have all the proper sitemaps set up? Robots.txt set up correctly? Are you seeing anything strange in Google Analytics or in Webmaster Tools? Have you set a preferred domain in Search Console? What platform is your website built on? Are you able to supply a link to the site so we can take a look and/or run some crawls to check it out?
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