I am interested in knowing the same. Is it possible to remove it?
I would add that the date is forced into English format: month / day / year. We do not use this format in France, but this one: day / month / year.
Same problem here !! I need to remove it
Hi everyone,
Thanks for using the Yoast SEO plugin on your websites.
First, I would like to clarify that the even if the “Date and seperator” shows within the meta descripton field from the latest version 22.7, the same date won’t be added to your meta description within the source code. You can confirm this by checking the source code.
The reason why we have added “Date -” to the meta description field is to help our users to understand that Google may include a date on pages. That allows you to tailor your meta descriptions and results better and avoid getting ‘cut off’ when a date is shown for your page. Moroever, this will also help our users to get a clear idea on the meta description length assessment as we add the character count of the date and the separator in our analysis. You can also read more on our KB article: Date appears in search results and How to create the right meta description.
That being said, even though you are currently seeing the date on the snippet preview and meta description field, it doesn’t mean that Google will always show the date on the search results. So it is best for everyone to see the date on the snippet preview and meta description field so you can optimize the meta description without any getting ‘cut off’.
I think this addition is unnecessary so why impose it? Why not provide an option to enable it or not?
Thanks for the clarification @josevarghese, it wasn’t obvious that this is just a ‘cosmetic’ and not actually a part of the published meta description. Upon checking the source code, I can confirm that the date and the dash aren’t included.
I have no problem with this then.
Hi @kromaweb,
I’m sorry to hear that it confused you. We want to assure you that your meta description output by the Yoast SEO plugin hasn’t changed with this change. That means the description you added to the field will be outputted as the same to the page source code without the Date and the Separator, which we added to the settings UI.
We added the Date and Separator to the meta description field UI 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 be added by Google and search engines) may result in a cut-off of your meta description.
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 current change concerns is only with the input field for the meta description, where we want to clarify that the date is also counted as part of the meta description. Again, there has been no change in how we calculate the length. So be assured that the color of the traffic light won’t change for any of your content.
We’re sorry if this change has caused confusion!
It’s a real problem if a simple indication causes so much confusion just to show “information”.
Especially since this indication is not reliable for sites using a language other than English (my sites are in French and the “tool” indicates the date in English). The dates are more or less long depending on the language.
This is why it would be preferable to be able to remove this indaction in the plugin options.