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

[ianizaguirre]

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.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[EGOL]

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.

[ianizaguirre]

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.

[ianizaguirre]

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?

[EGOL]

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.