The date-format drift that breaks Article eligibility

The date-format drift that breaks Article eligibility

Sources in the SERPs keep flagging it: datePublished and dateModified written as 'June 13, 2026' or 06/13/2026 instead of ISO 8601. Google needs 2026-06-13T09:00:00-04:00 — and crucially, a dateModified with no timezone offset gets interpreted as UTC, throwing your 'freshness' signal hours out of sync.

What it means for you: localized date plugins that render human dates into the schema field are a recurring offender. The visible date can be pretty; the JSON-LD value cannot.

Watch this: faking a fresh dateModified on every cron run without changing content is now a known spam pattern — Google compares it against the actual content diff and discounts liars.