Mueller confirms updating time and date doesn’t provide a good search engine algorithm

On April 1, Google’s John Mueller opens up about search ranking issues during the Google Search Central SEO hangout. Mueller suggests; how only changing publishing dates on different web pages is not enough. He advises unless changes were made in the content, it is not possible to evidenced improvement in search rankings.

A site owner questioned Mueller about updating the dates on the website’s photo galleries each time a minor change is made. It further asks if updating the publishing dates can provide any benefit to the Google search results. Muller, on this advice, it would be worthless as Google’s search engine algorithm doesn’t work like that. He says any site owner can update the time and date at any time. But it could be misleading in some situations.

Mueller further suggests on avoid updating web pages’ time and date too frequently. Since pages do not get ranked in search engines for constant changes of time and date on a page. Rather, it might get beneficial or be of any worth if you make other small changes as well. Like if you make any significant changes in the content, you could then probably update the date.

Continuing which Mueller also says, “So my recommendation here would be, if your CMS does this by default, and you can’t control it, then like fine. If you’re doing this manually, kind of like tweaking the date every time you make a small change like shuffling images, then I would recommend just skipping that and only update the date when you actually make significant changes on a page.”

Mueller once posted the same advice targeting site owners to avoid “artificially” freshening articles adding a new date. There he explained the idea of Google’s search engine algorithm and how Google shows the date for pages that are mostly time-sensitive.