Hi,
You identified several issues. We have responded to them below.
A. Sitemap
Yoast sets an automatic 1000 entries per sitemap. So if you go over that amount it generates a new sitemap. 1000 was selected as an easier amount for Google to crawl and consume and for most servers easy to generate without using up lots of resources.
You are welcomed to change that amount to be 5000 or 10000 or whatever you think best fits your set-up. You can use the filter: wpseo_sitemap_entries_per_page.
Unfortunately, there’s a difference between the support we can offer and the level of programming needed to change (core) features of our plugin. Since we don’t want to take the risk that we break your website by suggesting incorrect or incomplete code, we cannot advise you on how to make such changes. And even though we cannot be of any assistance, you’re completely free to change anything in the plugin to better suit your needs.
If needed, we highly recommend checking out the Yoast supported partners here: https://yoast.com/yoast-partners/.
We will also leave this open for a week to see if someone from the community can help, after which we will close in order to keep the overview.
B. Is it better to enable the option ‘Show date in Google preview’ for blogposts (I have a news website with daily new published posts)?
We recommend that you enable the “Date in Snippet Preview” feature for your posts under “SEO > Search Appearance > Content Types” as this makes sure the description doesn’t exceed the maximum length. This applies only to the link in a regular Google Search.
However enabling that feature does not make the date appear in Google. You will need to make the decision if having the date appear in a regular Google Search is good or bad for your audience.
People will naturally look for posts with a more recent date, assuming that they contain the best information. However, sometimes older post can hold very valuable information, but won’t get the same amount of clicks due to their age.
C. Disable The Date
We also know that Google uses the datepublished structured data Yoast outputs as one signal to determine if it should show the date. This guide explains more: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/03/help-google-search-know-best-date-for.html. Unfortunately, Yoast does not have a feature which removes that piece of structured data.
The only workaround is to use our filters here https://developer.yoast.com/features/schema/api/#add-or-remove-graph-pieces to remove that data. Bear in mind that removing this will generate a warning in the Google Structured Data Tool: The dateModified field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.
Unfortunately, there’s a difference between the support we can offer and the level of programming needed to change (core) features of our plugin. Since we don’t want to take the risk that we break your website by suggesting incorrect or incomplete code, we cannot advise you on how to make such changes. And even though we cannot be of any assistance, you’re completely free to change anything in the plugin to better suit your needs.
If needed, we highly recommend checking out the Yoast supported partners here: https://yoast.com/yoast-partners/.
Note, that we will keep this topic open for 1 week in case a member of the community is able to provide additional help. After which we will close it to keep the overview.
Once you have removed the date, if you only have a few pages try using Inspect Any URL on the page. This guide explains more: http://kb.yoast.com/article/108-fetch-as-googlebot. This will force Google to reindex the page and hopefully the date will disappear from Google’s index. If you have a large site, you may need to resubmit your sitemap. This guide explains more: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/submit-sitemap-search-engines/#google.
D. News SEO
For your news site we have a News SEO plugin which can help SEO news items to appear in a Google News Search. The News SEO is superior for several reasons
Premium support: News SEO plugin gives you access to our support team. You can email us your questions about usage of the plugin or your problems in setting it up and we’ll assist you!
Customization: The News SEO allows you to customize your News articles for optimization. For example, you can add a News Genre and Stock information.
Note, that Google recommends setting up a Google News Publisher account: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607025?hl=en.
You can learn more about the plugin including how to buy it here: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/news-seo/.
