Do you think its better to have a published date AND a last updated date ? Does google even look if you updated but left the published date old
-
Do you think its better to have a published date AND a last updated date on Posts ? Does google even look if you updated but left the published date old
I was thinking of adding a "last updated" field to my articles. But is it worth it? or should I just keep it uncluttered and leave only the last published date? I would think that Google would not notice if I updated a last updated meta field since their is a published date field already.
-
I agree about not using css to hide the date. I would not hide anything on a webpage.
I don't know enough about WordPress to tell you how to do that. It probably can be done, but I don't know for sure.
-
Thank you for your response.
If I am going to NOT include a date on some posts - How would I go about doing this?
I use wordpress, and the post date is included in the post meta field by default when a post is published. I do not think that simply using css to hide the post date by "display:none" is the correct way, since that would only hide it from people and not from a google crawler. And I would NOT want to hide the date on ALL posts - Only on some posts. Do you know how I would go about implementing this? Would this require that I make another post template or something?
-
Thank you for your response.
But did they update their posts date ? Or just a p span that said something like Last Updated: 11/02/15
That is where I am confused. I use wordpress so I am trying to understand, that if I do implement a "Last Updated" field, I want to know if I have to physically code it into my single posts template file a certain way so that google can know what it is when it crawls it. The last thing I would want is to code it, but code it a certain way that google will see it as a p span that is part of the body text and not as a special last updated meta field or something like that. I see there are some plugins but I don't want to use a plugin for one meta field.
-
I think that a lot of articles can be written without a date if they are content that is close to being totally evergreen. If you add a date to these articles and that date is a few years old, it can tarnish the opinion of the visitor when there is nothing wrong with the article, and the article might even be among the very best on the web. So, I don't date a lot of my articles for that reason.
I am always upgrading articles, which is different from updating. An update is when you add fresh news or information that is totally new about the subject. An upgrade is when you add another section of evergreen content, add new photos, improve photos, add a video, do a rewrite for clarity, or other type of improvement. I notice that when I upgrade an article it often moves higher in the SERPs. Usually just a few positions if it is on the first page, but if it is deep in the SERPs, it might move up substantially. I've never had anything move from bottom of first page to #1, unless it moved into the featured snippet.
If you have a website with a few thousand articles and your author team is two or three people, if each of them update or upgrade one article every working day, there will be articles on your site that go a long time without an update. Figure 200 working days in a year and a three person team.... if you have a 6000 article website that means it will take ten years to upgrade or update every article - if you do them in a straight rotation.
-
There have been some interesting articles surfacing recently on this with the last study I read (this week) showing that simply updating the date with "Last Updated" and updating the article, refreshed something that was a year old and that had dropped from the first page to the second, and had reached position 1 again.
This is definitely something that anyone with a blog should look to do.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
old posts / delete or update Big Site with more than 6000 articles
Hi, my site is related to education and i published more than 6000 articles from last 10 years, i naver delete but frequently update the Good Articles but some old articles that is not giving visitors, i did not update and some of them are short articles. i started in year 2021 and many articles in year 2012 to 2023 i write. please check my site and advise can i delete old out dated articles ? and countinue writing new articles with same topics, actuly from last month of August 2023 my site visitors lost with time from more than 70 percent.
Content Development | | bedah
thank so much for advise.
can i delete out dated content?
some of my contents are not ranking even i update before it was on top position but now even after update still other website is ranking more than me in current year.
#old Content ?
#update or delete?0 -
Is it a good idea to publish a list of players in my industry, including competitors?
I am working with an e-commerce site that does mostly B2B sales in a very commoditized industrial product segment in which very few manufacturers sell direct. It's all done through distributors and resellers, like our site. We don't often win on price, but we do win enough SERP battles to get the visitors and provide great customer service, so we have gained a following and we do compete well for some very large orders. We list several thousand products and in a given month, visitors regularly hit over 1,000 different landing pages. While we make most money from relatively few items, most items are sold only once a year, maybe twice. It's a very longtail business, and therefore tough to do a great job optimizing all pages down the tail. So, one thing I'm doing is building out a set of resource pages with common questions, terminology and other useful bits so the site gains more traffic and authority, in the hope of boosting product pages. e.g., an in-depth category definition in the glossary could link to all the items in a category. In addition to adding content that augments product pages, I'd like to create basically a map of the whole industry, including brand name manufacturers, white label manufacturers, distributors, etc. If it's going to be a truly comprehensive list, it should include my competitors. Given that I have never found such a list, it feels like this could be a good page and earn some links. Since it's unlikely much traffic will even find that page, compared to product pages, are there potential pitfalls I should be aware of? I get the feeling if I create a page that others bookmark and visit when hunting for products in our market, we win, even if most visitors to that page won't buy from us. I've been in this industry for four years now, and it's amazing how hard it is to find some companies. Only a handful even think about SEO, since they sell through other channels. Should I link to all my competitors (which is only about a dozen) among hundreds of other industry links?
Content Development | | Mike_Sobol0 -
Is there harm in publishing too much content, at once?
We are working on catching up with some competition, who has done a much better job over the last few years with content creation. We normally publish 1 article a day but are looking at scaling that up to 3 to 4 articles a day so we can get our content out there to compete with the other websites, in keyword space we currently aren't in. Is there a negative impact on publishing too much content at once? Is there a negative impact on publishing too much content at once? Besides the probable inability to market all of it, I don't see any issues since we will be getting our articles indexed and out there for Google to start building value on them. However, some team members are apprehensive about doing too much at once. What are your thoughts Moz Community?
Content Development | | GoAbroadKP0 -
Website update frequency as ranking factor
Hellooo, Anyone have more info about this issue? I own 1 e commerce site, and one blog about soccer. Both are brand new, e commerce is older few months, with more backlinks and soccer blog with very few profile links from soccer forums. The soccer blog, was updated regularly 2 times per day, and I saw a tremendous rise on visits. Later on , I stop to update it, and then traffic drop immediately . Notice that I stop to build links at least 1 week before I stop to post content. But the site still enjoyed an increase in traffic even after I stop to add fresh links , and traffic dropped once I stop to create fresh content. The other e commerce site, wasn't updated at all, but I was building links and I saw similar increase in traffic. Niche of the e commerce is very boring (industrial) and none of competitors own a blog. Site is quite big, with not even half of links from competitors but I almost outrank them all with internal linking on competitive keywords. (note that site have over 200 pages with at least 300 words each in contrast with competitor sites of 20 pages). Then I added a blog and I saw similar increase in traffic with the soccer blog. Once I stop to update again the blog, traffic dropped again.. anyone with similar experiences?
Content Development | | nyanainc0 -
Short blog post or Long Blog post, Which works better?
I was thinking, that SEOmoz or other technical SEO blog writes long blog post which cracks my interest when i start reading few lines of the blog post. My mind speak, Wooo! so boring.In SEO what will be best post long or Short? Thanks
Content Development | | tapankumar0 -
Archiving old blog posts - yea or nay?
I'm building up my personal website. When I moved from my old domain to my current one a few years ago, I had moved a folder with all my old blog posts (from an old blogger.com account) to an archives called /blog/. It's bad enough the entries just text and nearly all the images aren't there but because of the way I moved over the posts, I have 200+ duplicate page titles with no meta descriptions. Is it worth saving these posts ? (putting them into an archives.mysite.com sub-domain?) I already have the folder disallowed in my robotos.txt file and there's nothing really incredible content-wise in the archives, though they are some of the oldest pages on my current (3 years old) domain. There's no real SEO thought in them as this was just a fun personal blog at the time. Thoughts?
Content Development | | JamesDziezynski0 -
Sub Domains or Multiple Domains? Which is a better way to go for blogs?
We just can’t decide what the answer is, particularly from an SEO perspective. We want to run multiple blogs on different categories, please assist on deciding should we go with different blog domains or create subdomains for each category.
Content Development | | amitjain0 -
Old articles in a blog
Hi, I would like to know your opinion about old article obsolete in a blog. Do you think it's preferable to totally delete them from Wordpress CMS? Considering the fact that Panda update measures "Bouncing Rate", "Time on site", and all that? Thanks for your opinion and advice! (Sorry if my english is not perfect, 2nd language 😉 )
Content Development | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0