Unpublish and republish old articles

[Funlocity]

This might be a dumb question but we had an incident where a new SEO guy thought it would be a good idea to un-publish and republish all of your 200+ blog posts which we carefully scheduled over the last 6 months. He did not update the content and did not change anything. His intention was to send out google a sign to recheck the sites or something. Now, the entire blog looks like it wen't live in one day, which I don't think is good? Should we load a backup and get our old publishing dates back, should we keep it with the new publishing dates? What are the consequences? Will it effect our SEO?

[Funlocity]

You guys are awesome!! Thank you so much! That is exactly what we thought! Thank you for confirming, we loaded a backup.

[Ria_]

From a user standpoint, you should definitely roll back the old dates. Otherwise, it's going to raise suspicion as to why they've all been published on the same date and for current event articles, having the wrong date is not helpful at all for those who are looking at the relevant time frame.

If the content was updated, on the other hand, then it's worth updating the publish date on the article to the date it was updated. And the article will probably be all the better for it, in terms of SEO!

However, as it is, I don't think it's going to have any noticeable effect on the SEO to have the dates as they were or as they are now. But think of the users.