There are plenty of opinions in the web regarding whether you should show the date for a post or not. Displaying the post date encourages the search engines to show the date in the search snippets. I’ve been reading too many suggestions from the experts where they advised not to show the publishing date in search result snippet to get a better click through rate. But it is bit confusing. The suggestion could be partially right for the sites having less number of ever green posts and for those who do not update their old articles.
If your site has a lot of articles which have been written over the years, it is quite natural that you need editing or updating them. Hiding the date from the search result will keep the freshness of the page even if you have edited and updated a significant part of the article. But, if you display the last modified date for the posts in your site, Google will update that in its search result and show the last modified date. Thus, you can make all your older posts renewed. Otherwise, the older posts will remain as vintage in SERP.
In this article you can learn how to display last modified date for the posts in Genesis child theme intelligently.
How to display Last Modified date for Updated post
By default, the WordPress themes, even the Genesis child themes show the published date for any post using the get_the_date() function which retains only the date on which the post was published. If you edit any published post in future, the above function cannot return the date of modification. That is why you need to upgrade the default code in your WordPress child theme. Here is how to do that.
Grab the code from this link: last-modified-genesis.txt and paste at your child theme’s function.php file.
Once done, your child theme will display the last modified date as ‘Updated on:’ for the posts which you re-edited or updated and the published date as ‘Published on:’ for the posts which you did not still edited or updated. You can view it live at this site.
Conclusion
I have read numbers of tutorials in the web suggesting not to show dates for the posts which are ever green. But believe me, that will not help you too much as Google is much smarter and they will push back the old articles in search results even you hide the date from it.
What is in your thought? Let’s know.
I’ve added the code. Thanks a ton mate:) Just wanna know whether this code is fully compatible with HTML5 child themes or not 🙂
Sure! It is fully compatible with HTML 5. You can use this code in any Genesis child theme.
Hi,
I copied the text and pasted it into my Genesis Minimum Pro Theme in the function Php file and it doesn’t seem to be working. Not sure what to do.
Make sure that you’ve placed the code properly. It should work. We’ve checked it several time.
“placed the code properly” is there a specific spot in the Function PHP to put it? Is it replacing anything?
Thanks! Excited to see this work!
Thanks for the great article. I used it on one of my Genesis child themes and it worked well.
However, my other site which uses eleven40 child theme doesn’t show updated date like the first site? What could be the reason for this?
This tutorial only works for Genesis child theme. Make sure that you have used the code properly.
Thanks for the useful info. Works like a charm..
My finding is that it will not work if you have the simple edits activated – you get it to work by using the [post_modified_date] in case of using simple edits!