There has been a lot of back and forth for years on whether the post date is relevant to rank position. We have ready so many posts and have seen some say yes, there is a direct effect – while others say no way.
Well, we decided to run our own unscientific test.
We started this post on August 11, 2016 by noting all current rank positions for the pages we were testing, changing the post dates of these specific posts to August 11, 2016 and noted what we changed below.
From the dates of 8/11/16 through 8/30/16 we did no other work on the website that would influence the outcome of this test.
TEST POST 1 – UNNATURAL OUTBOUND LINK POST
Unnatural Outbound Links
Original Post Date: April 12, 2016
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Made no post modifications – just removed a line that stated “updated April 19, 2016”, changed post date to reflect “Last Updated 8/11/16 and saved.
Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
#6 – “unnatural outbound links”
#6 – “links warning”
#9 – “outgoing links penalty”
#12 – “unnatural links warning”
#21 – “google unnatural links penalty”
Key Word Rank 8/30/16:
#5 – “unnatural outbound links”
#6 – “links warning”
#7 – “outgoing links penalty”
#9 – “unnatural links warning”
#19 – “google unnatural links penalty”
TEST POST 2 – THREE BASIC GOOGLE ANALYTICS METRICS
Basic Google Analytics Metrics For Non Profits
Original Post Date: October 18, 2015
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Modified some on page content for aesthetics only (font sizing, color etc) and saved to update the post date to last updated August 11, 2016.
Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
#8 – “google analytics for nonprofits”
#27 – “google for nonprofits review”
#41 – “metrics for nonprofits”
#51 – “nonprofit analytics”
Key Word Rank 8/30/16:
#12 – “google analytics for nonprofits”
#19 – “google for nonprofits review”
not in top 50 – “metrics for nonprofits”
not in top 50 – “nonprofit analytics”
TEST POST 3 – MOZ KEYWORD EXPLORER
Moz Keyword Explorer Review
Original Post Date: May 12, 2016
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Added a blurb to the final thoughts section about the stopping use of MOZ and added the last updated date of August 11, 2016.
Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
#11 – “moz keyword tool”
#16 – “moz explorer”
#26 – “rank tracker reviews”
#33 – “moz ranking”
#44 – “moz open site explorer”
Keyword Rank 8/30/16:
#17 – “moz keyword tool”
#13 – “moz explorer”
#33 – “rank tracker reviews”
#31 – “moz ranking”
#40 – “moz open site explorer”
Once we made our post edits and saved the changes to reflect the updated date – we went to our Google Search Console to submit the URL’s to the Fetch As Google feature so Google can come and crawl the pages a bit faster.
TEST POST 4 – FREE SEO TOOLS
Free SEO Tools
Original Post Date: May 26, 2015
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Added 2 new tools to the page and removed last updated text at the bottom of the post and changed dated to last updated August 11, 2016.
Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
We currently have no real keyword rank for this post that is worth noting. Our goal is to rank for “Free SEO Tools”, we may do another case study on this as we try to improve this page. We do rank for a lot of terms related to “small seo tools” but that is related to a set of actual branded tools and not what we were going for.
Keyword Rank 8/30/16:
For this post we have acquired a few spots since we started tracking data on 8/11/16. We actually jumped in to a lot of top 100 spots for terms we would want to to rank for.
#44 – “top free seo tools”
#46 – “best free seo tool”
#48 – “free seo tools 2016”
#46 – “the best free seo tools”
#21 – “free seo tool”
OUR RESULTS
In our own testing – we do not see an association with the post date and rank position. There are a lot of things to consider when doing this kind of testing – we just did a basic test with no other variables.
In our test we removed the Date Published time used by WordPress by default and replaced the post date with the Modified Date so that our posts always reflect a date that is consistent with our content updates. Now every time we update a post – the date we did the update will show instead of the original post date.
We prefer this as a usability item for our readers – letting them know our content is kept updated is important to us as it defines our dedication to keep our content fresh and lets readers know how current the information is. This is critical in our niche since things change so quickly.
In other niches, the date may not be as critical. If you have a lot of evergreen content the date issue should not really be an issue for you.
SIMILAR POSTS
Below are a few posts that are related to our test – some show improvement in rank and traffic while others have seen no affect like us. Some have reported seeing increases in traffic to posts – no rank improvement but traffic improvement for a short time. We did not find that in our results.
Share your thoughts!