Podcast episodes not updating correctly in iTunes

Question

Hello,
I am having a problem with my podcast episodes not updating correctly in iTunes.  The last 5 episodes I published appeared in iTunes at the bottom of the episode list, as if they were old episodes--i.e., they appear as if they were the first 5 episodes published.  They also do not have a date assigned to them as the rest of the episodes do.  They were not distributed to podcast subscribers, possibly because iTunes is not recognizing them as new episodes.
Here is my podcast feed: http://ic.instantcustomer.com/instantcasts/feed/podcast/5047174b90f14efe542431c2 674b1bd9
And here is the link to my podcast in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/small-business-marketing-minute/id896451432
The problem began with last Wednesday's episode, which was Episode 30, and has continued ever since.  I did not do anything differently when I published that episode than I did when I published the previous 29 episodes, and those updated just fine, or at least seemed to as far as I could tell (i.e., they appeared correctly on iTunes, and appeared as a new episode for me as a podcast subscriber).  Also, after examining the rss feed, I could not see any difference between episodes 1-29 and episodes 30--34, at least as far as the way the feed was formatted.  So, I have no idea what triggered the problem, and no idea how to fix it.  If I can't resolve the issue then I think I'll have to abandon the podcast, since there's no point in publishing a podcast that doesn't distribute new episodes to subscribers. 
If anyone can shed light on this problem for me, it would be most appreciated.     Thanks!
-Kevin

Answer 1

As you say, in the Store the latest episodes don't show a publishing date. When subscribing in iTunes, none of the episodes show a publishing date, and they are listed in the order they appear in the feed.
In the feed, none of your episodes has a 'pubDate' tag, which is where iTunes gets the date from. Since most of the episodes in the Store have a date, it looks as if originally your episodes had this tag, but that five episodes back you did something in whatever method you are using to create your feed which removed these tags: the Store is presumably getting the dates from its cache since the episodes haven't changed, but obviously doesn't have the dates for the last 5 episodes.