Modified date not updating in YOAST Google Preview

We understand you have modified your theme to make sure that it shows the modified time instead of the published time. However, Yoast SEO snippet preview and as well as the Google search results are still showing the published date time which is unexpected for you. Let’s see what’s going on here.

Even though you have modified the theme to show the modified date-time, it doesn’t mean that Google will like the relevant change and will show the modified date-time immediately in the search results. Depending on your website and Google, it may take a while before Google shows the relevant changes in the search results for you.

On the other hand, we have tested the blog post here https://www.wanderisle.com/cebu-coron-tour-package/ from your site and see that Google is showing Oct 5, 2020 in the search results and we can confirm that it matches exactly with the date that appears on the relevant page below the heading.

Thank you for your reply. I guess it is just an issue related to google crawling, which may have not been done after I updated my site. ( I have already requested index and updated sitemap on CONSOLE week back but still ).

My query is why does the Google snippet of YOAST SEO not show the modified date? In my case it is showing published date only.

For your additional testing, I have checked the date of https://www.wanderisle.com/cebu-coron-tour-package/ link which shows 5th OCT in google, but in YOAST snippet it shows 28th September which was creation date.

Hi @wanderisle,

The Yoast SEO snippet preview can only display the post publish date saved in the database. If the date in the Yoast SEO snippet preview is the same as the publish date displayed in the edit post screen’s sidebar, then this is what we’d expect to see.

If you’d like the date to be consistent in the preview, you could do this by updating the publish date.

We understand that the date in the Yoast snippet doesn’t match on your site and that’s a bit confusing to see if you’ve changed the date in your theme and you’re seeing a different date in Google. We’re sorry that there isn’t a feature for you to change the date at this time.

You can safely disregard this difference or you’re welcome to submit a new feature request to allow you to edit which date appears in the snippet preview.

We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.

@wanderisle I’m curious about how you worked with a Meks theme to make this change. Did you update the child theme functions.php, and if so with what code? I have opened a ticked on this, but I thought I would ping you too, as it seems you’ve been down this road already. Thanks for any tips, insight, advice on showing MODIFIED rather than PUBLISH dates on posts and pages.
Cheers, Daniel

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by silverliebt.

@silverliebt You can use below solution:
Just navigate to your Theme Options > Misc > use last modified date for post meta data, and turn the option on.

DO note that the modified date does not reflect in yoast and it is issue on their side. However if you do above changes in Meks, then google should pickup your modified date.