Using WordPress 4.7.5, Yoast 4.8 and have a timestamp issue that i am trying to nail down. My general WordPress Timezone settings are as follows: Universal time / Chicago (UTC – 5).
All appears fine internally. Posts are published to my site showing the correct timestamp. The issue lies in how it is received by Google. The moment a post is indexed to Google, it shows as having been published “5 hours ago”. I most recently found in the Yoast XML sitemap that the “last modified” timestamp is showing my local time (as opposed to the UTC) followed by “- 5”, which leads me to believe this may be where the issue lies.
For example: If I post at 11:30am on 6/5/17, the timestamp shows “2017-06-05 11:30 -05:00”. Since my posts are correctly timestamped internally on my website but index to Google instantly showing as posted “5 hours ago” could Yoast be clocking my local time (then incorrectly subtracting the 5 hours) and passing this info to Google?
I’ve searched everywhere and cannot find a fix for this. Needless to say all help on this issue would be greatly appreciated!