[Support request] Page got no-indexed on Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and rankings zeroed on Google

[Azman]

Hello team Generatepress,

I have been a very happy user of Generatepress for like last 2 years. And I’m among the happy advocates of Generatepress’ 🙂

I am not sure if this is something related to Generatepress or not.

I have updated several blog posts on my site last month, from then I have noticed that one of the blog posts has lost all the rankings on Google and more surprisingly got de-indexed on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.

After a lot of research and discussion with my fellow SEOs, it seems to be some technical mishap on the website upon updating the content.

Could you guys please look at it and suggest what possibly went wrong in tech stuff.

P.S. the other posts are ranking fine, and it’s definitely not a compromised website with compromised content.
Added 2 posts in the private section, one that got affected and the other one which is fine even after making the same changes.

[Ying]

Hi there,

I’m not an expert on SEO, from a developer’s point of view, I did a lighthouse test for both of your 2 articles.

As you can see, the one that does fine got a 100 score on performance, the other one only got 83.

I know that search engines take site performance as a factor when they do the rankings.

I’m not sure how closely it’s related, but I would recommend giving it a try, improve the performance see if the ranking gets better 🙂

[Azman]

Ying, please take down the screenshot. Please take care that the sites don’t get disclosed in any way.

[Ying]

sure

[Azman]

Hey team Generatepress,

I have found why this one particular page of mine lost all the rankings on Google.

<meta property=”article:published_time” />
<meta property=”article:modified_time” />

Both of these meta tags of dates are missing from the source code of that page.

Only this meta tag of updated_time is there on source code:

<meta property=”og:updated_time” content=”2021-08-11T10:41:02+00:00″ />

Please tell me what should I do now, as I’ve already suffered a lot of loss during these past 2 months.

[David]

Hi there,

GP doesn’t add Meta properties such as those. An SEO plugin would be generating them, you should check with the SEO plugin author

[Azman]

Guys, there is definitely something wrong with the theme because yesterday I changed the theme on my blog, and guess what the Google has started picking the lost page up again though I have lost my hard-earned rankings during these past 3 months.

But the page is visible now on SERP.

One thing I noticed that I would like to share is during these past 3 months when I googled the URL of my lost ranking post, it showed no date stamp on the SERP. But now after changing the theme it is showing the date of publishing.

Note: I was not hiding my dates before, I was displaying the Last updated dates instead. And Google was picking the last updated dates on SERP for blog posts.

Do you think this code that support asked me to add as snippet to display the modified date in SERPs could be the culprit?

add_filter( 'generate_post_date_output', function( $output, $time_string ) {
    $time_string = '<time class="entry-date published" datetime="%1$s" itemprop="datePublished">%2$s</time>';

    if ( get_the_time( 'U' ) !== get_the_modified_time( 'U' ) ) {
        $time_string = '<time class="entry-date updated-date" datetime="%3$s" itemprop="dateModified">%4$s</time>';
    }

    $time_string = sprintf( $time_string,
        esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
        esc_html( get_the_date() ),
        esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'c' ) ),
        esc_html( get_the_modified_date() )
    );

    return sprintf( '<span class="posted-on">%s</span> ',
        $time_string
    );
}, 10, 2 );

I genuinely don’t want to ditch using Generatepress. It’s a robust theme and I’m using it for like last 3 years or so. But now I’m forced to move away. Hope you guys will detect where the problem is and will regain me as a Generatepress user. 🙂

Thanks

[David]

That PHP Snippet simply changes the Post / Updated Date in the Post Content.
It has no bearing the missing meta properties flagged here

All the Theme does is present the date in the content, it doesn’t add the meta properties that is the SEO plugins work.
However there may be a conflict between the date visible on the screen and the SEO meta ie. if they don’t match then google will probably see it as an issue.

Simple test would be to remove that function, and recheck your site.

But i can’t explain why you were missing the Meta tags on that specific post.

[Author]

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