Publishing Date Always Refreshed?!

[Vantelli]

Hey guys,

I have a strange issue with my site. For some reason it shows fake publishing date for many posts. For example, on my homepage there are always bunch of posts which shows today's date and yesterday's date even those posts were published months ago. Its totally random. Today it will be one batch of articles, tomorrow another, so there's no rule.

This thing bother me the most because I'm afraid this could jeopardize my organic rankings. When I'm checking my positions in Google I see my site with "2 days ago" or "4 days ago" mark. Google could think that I'm up to something, that I want to show how my posts are always fresh etc... You get it.

Did you ever had such issue with your site? Any suggestion how to fix this?

[TorontoBoy]

This does not happen to me. Have you verified the web publishing dates with the dates of the posts from the admin area? Even if you updated the post the publish date should stay the same. I update posts all the time but the original post date remains. There is a record of all saves at the bottom of post itself, called revisions. When your post auto-publishes, does the new date stay in your original post?

Do you have any funky plugins doing this behind your back? There are plugins that do this. I would be worried about Google as well. They might take these shenanigans as gaming their system.

To track it down, you know when the post published date was changed and you know the post name. Look in your raw access log and try to track it down. Search on the 3d column, the request column, for your post name. It should tell you the time and date. Find the IP address in col 1. Look up the IP address on whois.com. If the IP address is your ISP then look at the user agent. This might indicate it is your cron running. If the IP address is unknown to you it might indicate a weird hacker has broken into your WP install, is changing publish dates just to freak you out ;)

[Vantelli]

I'm pretty sure it's not about hackers or anything similar because I have that on many of my sites. Actually I think it's about no comment plugin. I install it on most of my sites right after WP installation (to avoid spam comments). I didn't installed the plugin on one site where I wanted to allow visitors to post comments through FB plugin and on that site I don't have the issue.

I tried to unable and delete the no comment plugin, but nothing happened. The problem with wrong dates still persist.

Would like to know if deleted plugins leave some files behind them and how I can completely get rid of all their effects.

[TorontoBoy]

To find out if the plugin is gone, login to your host and look at the file manager. You can also do this with an FTP client, like Filezilla.

Go to public_html > WP directory > wp-content > plugins, look for your plugin. There should be no directory for your deleted plugin. If there is then delete it and the plugin will not show up in your WP admin.

Note: You don't need a plugin to stop all comments. You simply disable comments for the whole wp site. Each plugin is a potential security risk, so the fewer plugins the better. They need to be updated as well.

[not2easy]

The "No Comment" plugin sounds like overkill since you can disable comments on a per post or per page basis prior to posting in most setups. Some plugins can create a table in your sql file. You can see each table and drop tables related to deleted/uninstalled plugins using phpMyAdmin or your favorite sql tools.

[Vantelli]

You're right, I've just disabled and deleted the plugin. After that I checked the wp-content folder and it seems that the plugin is removed from it.

Do you think I can hire someone to fix this for me?

[TorontoBoy]

The best thing to do is contact the plugin author. This is to ensure his plugin was the issue. It may not be his plugin that is causing the change. You'll need to wait (a day or two) to see if the issue went away. You could pay the plugin author to fix his plugin. I'm sure he would appreciate it.

[not2easy]

Did the removal of the plugin change the date behavior you had noticed? If it did, there is nothing to fix. Keep in mind that you may see cached content for awhile unless you try a different browser or device or clear cache.

[Vantelli]

I tried to disable all plugins and nothing happened. I mean the problem still persist. Fortunately I have a pro theme on my main site which allows me to disable dates. I'll keep dates off until I hear from the plugin author (I sent him an email a hour ago).

[TorontoBoy]

Pro theme, eh? You might also ask your theme writer about this issue. Usually themes are vetted by Wordpress.org before they are made available, and they check these things. For pro themes, all bets off.

Standard WP troubleshooting: Disable all plugins, install the 2017 theme, or one of the other standard reference themes that ship with WP and see if the issue goes away. Slowly install plugins to see which one might be the cause.