Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Wordpress Site Google search microformat update errors (Error: Missing required field "updated".)

A few weeks back around October 15th 2014 I noticed that all my websites were loosing their SEO Ranking fast almost dropping to nothing.


I had no idea what was going on so I started to do some research. 

One thing I noticed I had Thousands of crawl errors so I cleared them up. I also re-submitted my site (using Fetch as Google in Webmaster tools) things looked a little better but the Search Quarries were still dropping in addition the amount of traffic I was getting to my sites was also at an all-time low.

Then I noticed the exclamation mark next to STRUCTURED DATA I did some more digging and turns out Google uses microformats to understand the content of your site, all of my posts were generating the following error:

Error: Missing required field "updated".

I'm using the latest version of wordpress and many different plugins and themes on several sites, so I was looking for the quickest and most simple solution to the issue and here is what I found: 

Adding this line of code after the Header tags on the following .php documents (depending on your theme you might not have all 4, just add it to all the .php files that start with the word "content") 
TIP information on how to get to the editor on wordpress (from the admin panel it's under Appearance > Editor > click on the .php document you want to edit on the right) 

content-page.php
content-single.php
content-summary.php
content.php

 <p class="post-date date updated"><?php the_time('j M, Y'); ?></p>

After entering the line of code going back to the STRUCTURED DATA tester 
link: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

All the "update" errors were gone!




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