Should you ever change the date on blog posts and articles?

When it comes to managing blog content on your website, there’s a grey area around updating publish dates.

Some people manipulate publish dates to make articles appear more recent in Google’s search results. The idea being that people searching are less likely to click on a content with an older date because they perceive it to be out of date. However, this practice goes against Google’s guidelines and could be considered deceptive.

TL;DR (Quick Summary)

• Never change the publish date without making significant content changes
• If you update content substantially, show both “Published” and “Last Updated” dates
• Use plugins like WP Last Modified Info to handle this automatically
• Google’s John Mueller confirms: changing dates without content changes is “noise & useless”
• For complete rewrites, consider using a new URL with 301 redirects from the old content

Why People Want to Change Dates (And Why It Matters)

Before diving into the rules, let’s understand the motivation behind date manipulation.

The Click-Through Rate Factor

Google displays dates in search results, and users naturally gravitate toward newer content. When choosing between search results, many users will click on an article dated 2024 over one dated 2019—even if the older article ranks higher.

This creates a tempting shortcut: just change the date and get more clicks, right?

Why This Doesn’t Work

Google is smarter than that. Their systems compare:

• The current page content to previously crawled versions
• Your sitemap’s <lastmod> dates to actual content changes
• User engagement signals after they click through

If users click expecting fresh content but find the same old information, they’ll bounce—which hurts your rankings more than the stale date ever did.

What GoogleBot Knows About Your Content

GoogleBot – Google’s scraper which browses and scrapes the web, knows when content was first published and when it was updated or changed. And so the value you assign to your content, for example the publish date or “last modified” date should reflect that. If you try to game the system you put yourself at risk of manual or automated penalties against your site, which could see your search engine rankings fall off a cliff – ouch.

What Google Says About Date Changes

John Mueller – Search Advocate at Google has helped clarify how to approach this issue in one of his Tweets:

When you write something new, or significantly change something existing, then change the date. Changing the date without doing anything else is just noise & useless.

@JohnMu – February 5, 2022

For context, John Mueller is a prominent figure in the SEO world, his insights and advice give us insight into how Google approaches the challenges of ranking content in search engines.

Important: Your Sitemap Dates Matter Too

Many site owners focus only on visible page dates but forget about their sitemap’s <lastmod> values. This is a critical mistake.

What Google Says About Sitemap Dates

According to Google’s official guidelines, the <lastmod> value should only be updated when there are significant changes to the page. If Google detects that your sitemap dates change frequently without corresponding content changes, they may:

• Stop trusting your sitemap’s <lastmod> values entirely
• Reduce how often they crawl your site based on sitemap signals
• Ignore your sitemap for prioritisation decisions

Best Practice

• Only update <lastmod> when you make meaningful content changes
• WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math handle this automatically when you update posts
• Manually editing sitemap dates without content changes is a red flag to Google

Real-World Results: What Happens When You Do It Right

Case Study: Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal consolidated 4-5 outdated articles about the same topic into one comprehensive, updated post. They:

• Combined the best content from each article
• Set up 301 redirects from old URLs to the new combined post
• Updated the publish date to reflect the substantial rewrite

Result: 8x traffic increase to the consolidated content.

Case Study: ShoutMeLoud

ShoutMeLoud experimented with removing dates entirely from their blog posts after being hit by a Google update. While this initially helped recovery, when they added dates back later, they saw a 40% traffic drop.

Lesson: The solution isn’t hiding dates—it’s keeping content genuinely fresh and letting dates reflect real updates.

The 80/20 Rule for Content Updates

Most successful publishers follow this guideline: if you’re updating less than 20% of an article’s content, don’t change the date. Save date changes for substantial rewrites where 80% or more of the content is new or significantly revised.

How do I display a last modified or “last updated” on my content?

So if you will be adding a date, then how exactly do you do it?

For WordPress Users

Most WordPress themes and plugins don’t have a built-in way to show both the original publish date and modified date. The WP Last Modified plugin is a helpful solution that displays both dates clearly on your posts and pages.

With this plugin installed, your articles will show something like “Published on July 15, 2021 / Last Updated on April 30, 2024.” This transparency lets readers know the content’s original publish date while also surfacing any recent updates.

If you are developer you may instead wish to adapt the Get Modified Date function. You could use this data to output a snippet onto your webpage.

Some example snippets are below, you could add these directly into your theme files or you could use a snippet manager like CodeSnippets or FluentSnippets to add them.

<?php
// Basic usage - returns the default formatted date
get_the_modified_date(); // Output: April 13, 2025

// With specific format using PHP date parameters
get_the_modified_date('Y-m-d'); // Output: 2025-04-13
get_the_modified_date('F j, Y'); // Output: April 13, 2025
get_the_modified_date('M j, Y'); // Output: Apr 13, 2025
get_the_modified_date('Y/m/d'); // Output: 2025/04/13

// With time included
get_the_modified_date('F j, Y g:i a'); // Output: April 13, 2025 2:30 pm
get_the_modified_date('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // Output: 2025-04-13 14:30:00

// Inside HTML time tag for semantic markup
?>
<time datetime="<?php echo get_the_modified_date('c'); ?>">
    <?php echo get_the_modified_date('F j, Y'); ?>
</time>
<!-- Output: <time datetime="2025-04-13T14:30:00+00:00">April 13, 2025</time> -->

<?php
// Common format combinations
// Short date
get_the_modified_date('n/j/y'); // Output: 4/13/25

// Long date with day name
get_the_modified_date('l, F j, Y'); // Output: Sunday, April 13, 2025

// ISO 8601 date
get_the_modified_date('c'); // Output: 2025-04-13T14:30:00+00:00

// RFC 2822 formatted date
get_the_modified_date('r'); // Output: Sun, 13 Apr 2025 14:30:00 +0000
?>

<!-- Using with echo for direct output -->
<p>Last updated: <?php echo get_the_modified_date(); ?></p>

<!-- With conditional check -->
<?php 
if (get_the_modified_date() !== get_the_date()) {
    echo 'Last modified: ' . get_the_modified_date('F j, Y');
}
?>

For Shopify Users

A developer can help render this on the article page by accessing the last updated property in the article object. An example of some liquid code to output this in different date formats would be:

<!-- Basic timestamp output -->
{{ article.updated_at }}

<!-- With strftime formatting -->
{{ article.updated_at | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}   <!-- Example: April 30, 2019 -->
{{ article.updated_at | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}    <!-- Example: 2019-04-30 -->

<!-- Using default format options -->
{{ article.updated_at | date: format: 'default' }}  <!-- Example: Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:55 am -0400 -->
{{ article.updated_at | date: format: 'short' }}    <!-- Example: 30 Apr 06:55 -->
{{ article.updated_at | date: format: 'long' }}     <!-- Example: April 30, 2019 06:55 -->

<!-- Using time_tag filter for semantic HTML -->
{{ article.updated_at | time_tag }}
<!-- Outputs: <time datetime="2019-04-30T10:55:00Z">Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:55 am -0400</time> -->

<!-- Custom formatted time_tag -->
{{ article.updated_at | time_tag: '%B %d, %Y' }}
<!-- Outputs: <time datetime="2019-04-30T10:55:00Z">April 30, 2019</time> -->

<!-- Using localised date formats (defined in locales/en.json) -->
{{ article.updated_at | time_tag: format: 'month_day_year' }} <!-- Uses format from locale file -->

Exception: What if you completely rewrite some content?

In cases where you keep the same idea and focus of the article but the actual content is completely rewritten and reworked, then you can use a new publish date and publish it on a new URL. This signals to Google that it is a new piece of content and is specifically published.

However, you’ll want to properly redirect the old URLs to the new one using 301 redirects. This carries over any link authority the outdated content had earned.

Validating Your Publish Date Schema

Whether you update publish dates or not, it’s critical to have your schema structured data validated and optimized. Schema helps search engines better understand your content and can enhance your listings in search results.

You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to analyze your pages and identify any schema errors. For WordPress users, plugins like Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP make it easy to configure your schema sitewide.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the goal should be to provide the most accurate and trustworthy date information to users. Changing original publish dates solely for the purpose of appearing fresher in search results violates Google’s guidelines and could hurt your SEO.

Instead, embrace transparency by properly indicating when articles were first published as well as when they received substantive updates. With the right plugins, apps, and schema in place, you can manage this process smoothly while delivering a better user experience.