[Rank Math SEO Plugin] Structured data ignores timezone

[tilit]

Hello,

Great plugin, moving all our sites from Yoast to Rank Math. 

One issue I just discovered is with Schema timestamps. It seems that Rank Math doesn't pick up the timezone setting from WP. And especially if there's other timestamps on the page, which use the correct timezone, this can be an issue with Google not picking up the dates correct or at all since there's inconsistent information. 

Is this something you might be fixing anytime soon or should we find a solution on our end? 

[Mili]

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[Montgomerie]

Hello,

You can discard the above message posted by my colleague.

Google suggests using GMT timestamp, which is what we are using in the plugin. A website can be viewed from anywhere in the world, so adding a local timezone might screw things up.

You can read more about it here
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/article

and timezone is part of the format:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

You can read this if you still have any doubts:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32752211/should-the-schema-org-startdate-be-in-utc-or-the-local-timezone

As you note, Schema.org expects the date to be in ISO 8601 format, which allows both variants (with and without time zone). As they don't give any further restrictions, specifying the time zone (of your choice) is optional.

Hope that helps. If you have any further question, please let us know. Thank you.