Google search crawling/displaying incorrect date from plugin’s ‘json’

[Jon]

Had an artist’s management point out to us that the Google search results for their band were displaying an incorrect date preview below our event page in the search results (see attached image). After going through and searching for many of our other events we discovered some inconsistent results – where that date/venue preview is displayed for our shows, it is always off by a day (in the future), but not every event searched displayed the preview. Where there was also a Bandsintown, Songkick or artist website event for the same show also available, that listing took priority and displayed the date correctly. Some events showed neither.

Using the example referenced above, Nothing @ Slim’s on 6/21, looking at the code, we found this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
[{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Event","name":"Nothing @ Slim’s w/ Culture Abuse, Wrong","description":"<p>Door 7 / Show 8 People often wonder why Philadelphia\u2019s Nothing\u00a0are so damn loud. In the case of many artists, the volume stems from a preoccupation with negativity, misanthropy and the human condition. But while Nothing\u2018s attitude lines up with these ideas, their personality isn\u2019t one that the band picked from a list of cliches. </p>\\n","image":"http://www.slimspresents.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/22591946119-19649830.jpg","url":"http://www.slimspresents.com/event/nothing-slims-w-culture-abuse/","startDate":"2016-06-22T03:00:00+00:00","endDate":"2016-06-22T07:59:00+00:00","location":{"@type":"Place","name":"Slim’s","description":"","url":"http://www.slimspresents.com/venue/slims/","address":{"streetAddress":"333 11th Street","addressLocality":"San Francisco","addressRegion":"CA","postalCode":"94103","addressCountry":"US"},"telephone":"","sameAs":""},"organizer":{"@type":"Person","name":"Slim’s","description":"","url":"http://www.slimspresents.com/organizer/slims/","telephone":"","email":"","sameAs":""},"offers":{"@type":"Offer","price":"$15.00 - $39.95","url":"http://www.slimspresents.com/event/nothing-slims-w-culture-abuse/"}}]
</script>

Note that the “startDate”:”2016-06-22T03:00:00+00:00″,”endDate”:”2016-06-22T07:59:00+00:00″ shows the start and end dates as 6/22 even though everywhere within the actual event it is built as 6/21.

I’m guessing perhaps this is a timezone issue, but I can’t see where it could be originating from. The timezone in WordPress is set to UTC-8 and is set to PDT.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Brook]

Howdy Jessie,

I would love to help you with this. That does sound like a bug we have recently discovered and are working towards a fix on. As you suspected it relates to Timezone problems.

There is no great temporary solution right now :(. You can disable JSON-LD entirely while you wait for an updated version of our plugin that fixes this. Or, change your sites Timezone to a different one that compensates for the problem; but that will change the timezone everywhere including on your blog posts so usually this is probably not a good option. Do you want me to walk you through modifying your functions.php to disable JSON perhaps?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Jon]

Hi Brook,

Thanks, if you would walk me through what to change in the functions.php to disable it, that would be very helpful.

[Brook]

That sounds good. Thanks for getting back.

Paste the following snippet at the top of your theme’s functions.php file. Replace the opening “<?php” with this snippet, as this snippet includes that opening tag.

https://gist.github.com/elimn/88421b5a438bc7e18489917547d5f81d

The Markup should now be missing from your website. When Google next reindexes your site those little snippets of info will disappear.

Once this has been patched in our plugin we will post here letting you know. You can then remove the above snippet from you functions.php, and when Google reindexes the proper dates will show.

Does that sound like a plan?

Cheers!

– Brook

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