Meta description

I’m experiencing the same issue. I’ve checked the configuration, and the default variables for pages are set to none. However, the Date and hiphem variables now appear to be hard coded. I’ve been using Yoast for many years, and it has been great. I hope this issue gets fixed soon; otherwise, it might be a deal breaker for me. I’ll have to switch to another plugin if I need to change all my carefully designed meta tags descriptions for my customers.

Indeed, why is this option forced on us? There are many reasons some don’t want dates to be displayed!

Hello @netsales,

Thanks for using the Yoast SEO plugin. With our last Yoast SEO plugin version, 22.7,?we introduced a?date?and a?separator?snippet variable to the meta description text field, to make clear that both the date and a separator are automatically added to the character count of the meta description. Hovering over the variables reveals a tooltip with more explanation.

Why?
We added the Date and Separator to the meta description field UI (that cannot be removed) to help our users better understand that Google and other SERPs may show the date in the meta description on the search results. While writing the meta description for your page, consider that the characters of the Date and separator (which will be about 10-14 characters and may get added by Google and search engines) may result in a cut-off of the meta description you have added.

Search engines may display the date in the results based on their algorithms. Unfortunately, as mentioned here, there’s no way to directly control whether they show a date or not. That’s why we always display the date in the preview and consider it when calculating the meta description length. So there has been no change in this.

The Date and separator snippets won’t be shown on the meta description tag within the page’s source code. You can confirm this by checking the source code.

Hello,
OK, that should have been checked. Thanks for the explanation.
Nevertheless, this could have been depicted differently, as it caused a lot of surprise. In my initial understanding, I assumed that the number of characters would now be even shorter due to the date and hyphen when it came to the meta description.