This tutorial applies to our Genesis themes, see the Kadence tutorials for our Kadence themes.
This tutorial features the Feast Plugin, which enhances and extends your theme to improve SEO, pagespeed, accessibility and user experience.
The Edit Post Info feature enables bloggers to customize the post info of their recipe posts. Customizing and improving your post info allows you to gain an advantage over food blogs that haven't put the time and effort into these areas.
It completely overrides whatever is in the theme default + Genesis Simple Edits.
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How it works
It's no secret that visitors and search engines love details. Easily edit your post info to provide the date published, date updated and other details such as disclosures.
We've long advocated that your recipes should be evergreen and that dates shouldn't impact your content, and we still do.
But recent data shows that having date published and date modified are a good user experience, and may help search engine ranking due to additional schema.
Note: This only updates the post info on the post page. We do not recommend that you display post-info data on the home page or category pages.
datePublished and dateModified schema
See this post about why search engines like Google love having date information on posts.
Here's Google's John Mueller re-iterating that showing the published (and last updated) date is good for users:
Search engines
While you can inform search engines what you'd prefer to display, you have no control over what they actually decide to use or display. Nothing can be done if Google decides to display the published date, updated date, or no date at all.
Note that Raptive has stated that placing the Modified date before the Published date increases the likelihood of Google showing the most recent date (modified) which tends to attract user clicks.
Editing
The Edit Post Info can be accessed either by clicking the (edit post info) link on your post:
Or by visiting the Feast Plugin Settings page and scrolling to the Edit Post Info setting in the Posts section:
Updated before Published
One thing that can be done to influence Google to display the most recent (updated) date is to place it before the published date in your post info.
Our current default template is:
Modified: [post_modified_date format="M j, Y"] · Published: [post_date format="M j, Y"] by [post_author_link] · This post may contain affiliate links · [post_comments]Author Information
Link to your author profile to increase your E-A-T and improve search engine rankings.
See this SEMRush webinar with Casey Markee about why the post author information is important. We also have this post on recipe quality guidelines.
Your post_author_link is set in your Admin -> Users -> Your Profile -> Website field.
FTC Disclosures
Comply with blogging laws and regulations by adding disclosures for your privacy policy, ads, and sponsored content.
According to FTC requirements for disclosures, the disclosures need to be the same font, size and color as the body text and must appear before the first link.
Because of this, we don't recommend or support modifying the "Edit Post Info" to appear smaller than the body text.
But they can also be put into the post content on a post-by-post basis.
Conditionally display Updated date
The Feast Plugin automatically hides the updated date if it's less than 7 days after the published date, to improve user experience. It just isn't useful to know if a post was updated immediately after publishing.
This only applies if the "Edit Post Info" field has the same value as the recommended text we provide. If you customize the post info, this doesn't work.
For example, if you published a post on October 1st and updated it on October 6th, only the published date will show.
If you edited the post on October 8th, then the published date and the updated date will show.
Note: this will not affect the schema that gets sent to Google
Thanks to Arsen and Casey for this suggestion.
One-Date Logic
Raptive has advocated for one-date logic, with the goal of improving click-through-rates from Google Search, which may help Google detect and display the most recent date.
The simplest way to achieve this is to only display the modified/update date, and remove the published date entirely from the post info. The modified/updated date is always going to be the most recent date.
We see no issues with doing this.
Dates as a ranking factor
Dates are not a ranking factor, period.
This was abused over a decade ago by SEOs and Google explicitly stated at the Google Webmaster Conference in 2019 that it places zero trust in the dates provided by websites.
Instead, Google crawls and indexes pages, and uses its own crawl date as the date of that content, for ranking purposes.
Accessibility
Changing the font, font color or font size can lead to decreased accessibility compliance. The post info we provide through our theme and setup is specifically designed to optimally comply with accessibility requirements around font, font size, and color.
If you choose to change the post info font, font size, font weight or color, you may negatively impact accessibility compliance and are creating a custom theme.
Bold text
You can wrap <b></b> tags around text that you want bolded, eg.
<b>Updated: [post_modified_date format="M j, Y"] · Published: [post_date format="M j, Y"]</b> by [post_author_link] · This post may contain affiliate links · [post_comments]Note that failing to properly close a tag can make the entire page bolded.
This will break the Conditionally Display Updated feature above.
There's very limited number for HTML tags in the post info due to constraints in WordPress.
Move Post Info Above Title
When using the Feast Plugin v.12.0.0+ and Foodie Pro 5, you can now move the post info above the post title in the Feast Plugin Settings:
This is purely visual and has no affect on anything for SEO and accessibility.