There are instances where this method has been proven to work, in particular, in news related search results. However, there are SEO practices that indicate that any page could benefit from modifying published content dates. Even to the point that plugins were created that automatically changed publish dates for your pages. Does this simple hack work? We test that out.
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Transcription below:
Clint: Will updating the published date of a post affect rank? So this is a freshness update tests. Can it help you in how much of a boost we see from it as a result of doing it. And I've said before, this really matters based on your keyword.
If you look at your keyword, and there's a whole bunch of stuff from 2016, I think it's safe to say that you probably don't have, you're not gonna see too much of a benefit. They don't want the freshest content, they want the most accurate content from the most authoritative site that they have in their index versus news and stuff or, you know, in markets in which there are trends, like SEO is a market in which there are trends.
This post date stuff will actually help you out a lot. So here's the starting point. He just played around with these 2 pages. And you see, it just kind of went up 2 positions respectively. Let me make sure before I lie, yep, 2 positions respectively. So I think it's another one of those if you're number 3 and you want to get up to number 1, and you have all the content, why not try this?
This take your 30 seconds in WordPress to change the date, or you take you longer to log into WordPress and actually change the date. And you can maybe see a little bit out of this. In particular, if you have a fresh contents keyword that will really help you out, then you'll be running into issues where you got to get forced Google to recrawl. But there are plenty of tools. In order to do that.
There used to be a plugin, Jerry West made it called fresh pub. I'm pretty sure he doesn't offer it anymore. But there might be some other ones out there that do it. If you're in a market where this is actually working for you, try to find a plug in and just automate this process.
Eventually, you're gonna find it just stops working. Google's algorithm is trained, probably trained to catch on to some of this stuff, because this was publicly taught to people on webinars, etc. And then, as you know, once you teach something to somebody, they have to go ask John Mueller, if it works. He'll say no. And then the engineers will go figure out, oh, wow, does it really work? Or does it not? You know what I mean?
This kind of the case with this tool, or this concept, and you're not going to jump up from 5 to 15 or to page 1, or you're not gonna jump up from the bottom of the page and go straight to the top, but you will get at least a little bit of boost to that. All those help, especially if you combine this with the other tests, you change your 100 words and then change the publish date. Those two combined may knock you in the number 1 position.
Dori: Yeah, and that doesn't take into consideration the click through rate bonus that you would get with a more recent date for most markets. I know for SEO, you know, we're looking for whatever was the the most recent information.