Publish date on updated articles

Keeping your articles up to date is always a good idea, as it shows to your readers that your site offers current and relevant information. Furthermore, search engines will pick up on changes to your articles, and consider your site alive and up to date. That’s never a bad thing, right?

It’s especially important that you keep your cornerstone content articles up to date, which is why we added the stale cornerstone content filter to Yoast SEO Premium. But many other pages will also benefit from updating.

One question remains, though: what to do with the publish date? You may worry that people don’t want to read a blog post that was published five years ago, even if the content is evergreen or if you updated it just last week. Want to know how we handle the publish date on updated articles at Yoast? Let’s check this week’s question!

Kees van den Berg emailed us saying,

We’re often advised to update old articles. What to do with the publish date? Republish it on a new date? Or add a note that it has been updated?

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

What to do with the publish date on updated articles

“Now we do this all the time on Yoast.com, we go through our old content, and we update as necessary. If we completely rewrite the article or if a major part of the article is new, then we actually publish on a new date.

If only a tiny portion of the article changes, then we add a note to the article that we’ve updated it and we keep the old date. It’s that simple… so a bit of both. Good luck.”

Read more: Keep your content fresh and up to date! »

Ask Yoast series