Hi, I have 500+ pages on my Q&A website example.com on WordPress and I have the Yoast premium plugin installed and Activated on my WordPress site. The Yoast plugin has generated the sitemap.xml file and where last modification date for almost all Questions and the post is old. Why I am mentioning this is that I am noticing a drop in SERP ranking of my questions post. Earlier the ranking for most of the posts was on 1st page and now it’s no more in the top 100. May be 100+ or unknown to me now.
I was researching it for quite some days and noticed that the Q&A theme Discy which is built into my website is generating QA schema on my website by itself for each question page which gets created when someone asks any questions on the site user interface. Now, the worst thing here is the Yoast premium plugin installed on my WordPress site is also generating the Webpage Article type schema as well for each page on my site making each page have two schemas one is Article type and another is QA type which is causing conflict and Google finds it hard to prioritize which schema. Therefore, I have disabled the article schema generated by Yoast on my site and kept the QA schema for each page. After this update, the All Questions page was left with only one schema which is the QA schema but since there is no update on the content side of any page, therefore, the last modification date is still not changed and shows the old date for pages on sitemap.xml.
I know that I can do this by manually editing and updating each question post either from the WordPress backend or my website user interface which is a tedious and repetitive task and I don’t want to do that on 500+ pages. I am not getting how can I update the last modification date in Yoast generated sitemap.xml on all posts at once?
You can follow the below steps to update the
last modification datefor all posts, questions, and pages on your WordPress sitesitemap.xmlat once.Using SQL Query for bulk update:
You can use SQL queries to update the
post_modifiedandpost_modified_gmtfields in theWordPress database.phpMyAdmin.modification dateto thecurrent dateandtimefor all posts, pages, and questions on your site.UPDATE wp_postsThis SQL query updates theSET post_modified = NOW(),
post_modified_gmt = UTC_TIMESTAMP()
WHERE post_type in ('post', 'page','question')
AND post_status = 'publish';
post_modifieddate, which Yoast uses to generate thetag in yoursitemap.