Any Downside to Changing Published Dates on Posts

  • I was wondering if anyone knew of any negative consequences to changing the Published Date on a Post. I often change the Published Date in order to bring better Posts back to the top of the Recent Posts list. I don’t display dates on any of the Posts.

    Could there be a downside I’m overlooking? Does the Published Date impact search rankings? Since the URLs are all the same (my slug is Post Title) I’m not worried about links changing.

    Just thought I’d toss this one out to the community for some feedback. Any help greatly appreciated, thanks!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • It’s rude and misleading to change the publication dates on posts. Other than annoying regular readers of your site who may not appreciate being fooled like that, however, there is no downside to watch out for.

    It sounds like you are following SEO blogger advice to create everfake content. If it were truly evergreen it would receive traffic on a continual basis and you would never be tempted to engage in such fakery.

    Dates in the URLs are a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.

    Thread Starter dmurphyca

    (@dmurphyca)

    Hi ssfandom,

    Thank you for the reply. Perhaps I was not clear. I am not creating blog posts or trying to create “everfake content.” These are not articles or resource information. I’m actually using WordPress Posts for our company’s job boards which need to be ordered in a set way and so far the only way I’ve found out how to rearrange them for the Recent Posts section is to make their Published Dates follow in order.

    For example if I create three Posts (Post A, Post B, and Post C) but want Post B to appear at the top of the Recent Posts list I have to change the Published Date to a day ahead of whatever else was at the top of the Recent Post list.

    I am trying to ask if there is an alternative to this approach.

    None of this involves evergreen content since none of these posts stay active for very long.

    I have been involved with search engine optimization since 1998 and have never seen or heard of any negative consequence of doing what you are doing (as far as search engines are concerned).

    However, if you are only concerned about showing links in a sidebar widget you could use a TEXT or LINKS widget and just manually update the list of links as required. That would be more consistent with the way WordPress is intended for use.

    It’s really just a business decision, not an SEO decision.

    Thread Starter dmurphyca

    (@dmurphyca)

    Thanks for the reply sffandom. I won’t worry about the SEO effects. I had tried to use a simple Text widget with links but couldn’t match the style of my theme’s Recent Posts widget. Thanks again for sharing your experiences on this, much appreciated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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