Resolving Missing Updated Issue In Webmaster Tools
As a webmaster of a tech website where maximum traffic is organic via google search, it is a night mare to know that your structure data hentry is missing some values even after using many SEO plugins,etc. Basically structured data markup is used by google search to show visually appealing, information-rich search results and very much necessary for a website if iot wants to gets listed in front page and grow authority. There are many SEO Plugins like Yoast SEO, All In One SEO pack,etc. which also automatically adds the hentry for a website when you install it but this hentry generations are more dependent on the code of your wordpress theme.
So when we saw errors like “Missing updated” on our webmaster tools and almost all my links started showing errors like below:
In google’s structured data testing tool also we were able to see missing updated entry.
I started searching on google on fixing these but had no success though we got few nice articles about how to fix in other themes but the same never worked for our theme which was Suffusion.
So to fix and test the same we followed below steps: (Remember this fix was done on Suffusion theme on WordPress latest version)
To Fix missing updated issue on Posts:
1. login to WordPress as admin and navigate to Appearance > Editor and select Suffusion as the selected theme to edit.
2. Click on the custom/post-headers.php file and update below changes.
Search for
<div class="date"><span class="month"><?php the_time('M'); ?></span> <span
class="day"><?php the_time('d'); ?></span><span class="year"><?php the_time('Y'); ?></span></div>
Update it to
<div class="date value-title" title="<?php the_time('o-m-d'); ?>"><span class="month"><?php the_time('M'); ?></span> <span class="day"><?php the_time('d'); ?></span><span class="year"><?php the_time('Y'); ?></span></div>
3. Click on “Update File” button to save the changes.
4. Clear the cache if you are using any caching plugin so that WordPress will serve fresh code again.
5. If you are using any CDN service like cloudflare then enable the development mode for brief time till testing is completed to avoid pages being delivered from cache.
Once all above changes are completed follow below steps to make sure the missing updated issue has been fixed.
Testing for structured data :
1. Go to structured data testing tool link.
2. Copy any of your post’s url and put in the Fetch URL box and test the same.
3. You shall be able to see ‘updated’ entry in the outputs.
Google will also remove the warnings once it re crawls the same URL’s next time. So you have to wait for some time before this happens or you can resubmit you site map index file to force crawl your website. Usually it takes 2 to 3 days to start showing up and reducing the number of errors to finally zero.
Update 1:
Please find the screenshot of Structured Data page after 2 days of fixing the missing updated webmaster tools wordpress with Suffusion theme.
Update 2:
Incase you see warnings for missing: entry-title or missing: updated for pages like below screenshot then follow below steps to fix it.
1. login to WordPress as admin and navigate to Appearance > Editor and select Suffusion as the selected theme to edit.
2. Click on the custom/post-headers.php file and update below changes.
To Fix Missing entry-title issue (Missing: entry-title):
Search for
<?php the_title(); ?>
Update it to
<?php echo suffusion_get_post_title_and_link(); ?>
Example:
To
To fix Missing updated issue on Pages(Missing: updated):
Once all above changes are done search for below text
<?php echo suffusion_get_post_title_and_link(); ?>
Add below text just below to the above row
<div class="date value-title" title="<?php the_time('o-m-d'); ?>"><span class="month"><?php the_time('M'); ?></span> <span class="day"><?php the_time('d'); ?></span><span class="year"><?php the_time('Y'); ?></span></div>
Attaching the updated complete post-header.php file for reference incase someone wants to compare. Note: Suffusion theme version used 4.4.9
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