2023 Edition: Google Says Only Update The Date When Significantly Updating The Content
It is that time of year when content creators take their content that has been performing well and update it from the 2022 edition to the 2023 edition. But updating the references of 2022 to 2023 is not enough, and Google says only do that when you make a significant update to that content.
This topic comes up every year, SEOs who go by some sort of SEO script, by default just do it, they just update the 2022 editions to the 2023 editions with some minor tweaks to the content. But again, Google has been warning against relabeling old content as new for years, saying only update the dates when there is a significant change to the content. Google even said that most evergreen content does not require any date changes at all.
So, the topic came up again, let's call it the 2023 edition. John Mueller of Google was asked about it on Twitter and said "Is there significantly new content? Then update the dates. Is there no significantly new content? Then don't update the dates. We see a lot of spam & low-quality content that just arbitrarily updates dates ("Best fax machine for 2023"), it's pretty obvious & embarrassing." He did add "There's nothing wrong with updating content, and when you make significant changes, updating the date (or using an update-date). Serious sites do that. Just tweaking, and saying "oh, still valid in 2023" is not a significant update."
Here are those tweets:
Hi,@JohnMu 4/5 weeks to go to enter in 2023. So, if we start updating years on content titles and all in December how will Google act to sudden change in year which is not came yet? 😅
— Amit Saha (@amitsh053) November 26, 2022
How bout evergreen content that could be considered "new" through decades? Adding a few latest pointers along with date change should work!
— thunder jack (@junukn) November 29, 2022
Content Source: seroundtable.com
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