Google clarifies that updating page’s publishing date does not make you rank better

There are myths and there are facts in every industry. The same goes for SEO Industry as well. At the moment, there are some facts that we know about SEO. However, there are too many myths in the industry as well. However, we cannot clear those myths because even we are unaware if they are myths or facts. One of these myths is that you will rank better if you update publishing date of your page. What this means is that you don’t update anything else on the page other than the date.

Now, most of the editors let you do this simple function. And people believe that this will help them rank better in Google Search. Their reasoning is that updating the date will make the page more relevant in Search. This will mean that the page has been updated frequently. People also believe that Google does not check if content has been updated or just the date.

However, we can now confirm that this is a myth. Because Google’s John Mueller, in a hangouts chat, has revealed that this does not work. John said that it is good to display page publishing dates. But even if you don’t, it does not matter. He also said that if that was the case, weather forecast websites should be ranking much better as they are constantly updated.

He also said that it is beneficial from a user point-of-view to keep the dates of when the page was last updated. However, there is no relevance of it in Search Results.

There is something we would like to add here, though. We have seen that pages that have the latest content are shown first in search results so it might still be beneficial to keep your pages updated. That does mean you have to just update the dates of older articles, you should update the article content too.

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