Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
-
Hi everyone,
We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today?
If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site.
Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks,
Tom
-
Thanks for the great answer, Ray. We have been adding a note at the bottom of the post that it's been updated. I think we'll take your advice and give it a bigger call out at the top.
-
I would say that the only piece missing is the notification to the user that the article content has been updated.
Let's say that I read your blog everyday. I've seen this post previously, read it, and the content is value-added. Now I notice that the same post is again at the top of your blog - why? When I click into the article it seems similar to me, at first glance.
I would suggest putting a highlighted notification at the top of the post that informs the read the content has been updated for the latest trands|content|info|your word here
Now it makes perfect sense to update the publish date, informs the user that there is new content in the article, and it makes perfect sense for articles that are as old as your example.
-
I would update the date if the article has had a substantial change in content or the way it was written. It may help it get crawled sooner.
Malcom
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
-
How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
Hey Moz, It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis! I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly. Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles. So the situation is this. Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/ Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf So to note, the product ID will always remain the same. Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal. So the potential solution we thought was: we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux. Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input! Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | MH-UK0 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
How to change the woocommerce product page permalink
Sorry Posting it again. How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Wordpress versus html and google ranking
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress). My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Way to spider Wordpress site
I have an old Wordpress site and I want to move it to a new server and take it off Wordpress (too many hacks). I am trying to spider the site so as to get static, non-Wordpress, pages. I am having trouble doing this. When I spider the site, it changes the URLs. For instance, if the URL is www.domain.com/page/ the URL I get out of the spider is /page/index.html And those are not the URLs in the search engine indices. There are about 2000 pages on this site, so it is not feasible to set up 301 redirects. I tried using these spidering programs: WinHTTack Website Copier and PageNest Does anyone know of another method of turning a Wordpress site into a non Wordpress site?
Technical SEO | | DanCrean0 -
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
Technical SEO | | markgreggs0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
How do I add meta descriptions to Archives in Wordpress?
My most recent crawl returned a number of 'missing meta description' errors, and when I checked individual URLs, it turned out they were Wordpress Archived pages - for individual months and days (e.g. http:// .../2011/01). What's the best way to go about adding descriptions to these pages, if at all? Or should I have these pages not be indexed? I am using the All in One SEO plugin, so maybe there is an easy fix through this plugin, or it may be the cause of these errors? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance! **EDIT After looking it up further, I have decided to use noindex for Archives, which should solve my problem right? Or is there a benefit to having those archived pages?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0