Imported posts showing in search engine with import date, not post date

support
1

I did an import for a site that’s running Discourse 2.5.0 - https://github.com/discourse/discourse version 6a42acbfb72d4ea7dc501ff2240abc8e89f650c6. Post dates are showing up in google with, apparently, the import date rather than the post date. The correct date shows when you visit the post in the web browser, but the no-javascript/search engine view has what appears to be the import date rather than the (correct) post date shown in the web browser.

This makes Google users made because they say “Yay! a post from September 2020 with my exact problem!” and then they get to the site to find it’s actually from January of 2015.

Is this a feature or a bug?

Is there a way to make it so that the post date presented in the search-engine view has the actual date of the post rather than the import date?

Presuming that I could “fix” the date presented to Google, is there a way to have them re-index the site with the correct dates or is the damage simply done?

Edit: I see this in the meta tags:

          <span class="crawler-post-infos">
              <meta itemprop='datePublished' content='2015-01-11T03:19:59Z'>
              <time itemprop='dateModified' datetime='2020-09-09T20:05:21Z' class='post-time'>
                September 9, 2020,  8:05pm
              </time>
          <span itemprop='position'>#1</span>
          </span>

So I suppose I could do a replace to set updated_at to created_at for all posts before the migration. But, would it help?

And the site is on a subfolder, and their sitemap points to an out of date sitemap. If they were to install the sitemap plugin and update their sitemap to include a stanza pointing to /subfolder/sitemap.xml, would that help?

1 Like