Does changing a squarespace blog post's publication date affect seo | Squarespace SEO Series

“If you update an old blog post, should you change the ‘published date’? Are there any SEO benefits for doing this?”

This is a question that came up recently during a Squarespace SEO Audit & Consulting client meeting and I figured since this topic has come up before, it’s worth creating a blog post about it to help out the rest of my audience - that would be YOU, my lovely little website & SEO nerds :)

When it comes to SEO and ranking high for your desired keywords/key terms, we can all agree that Google (and other search engines) favour both new AND refreshed/updated content. This is pretty much true across the board.

If we think back to the very basics of SEO and how Google decides what content to return in search results, it always comes back to the best and highest quality content on the internet.

Whether we’re talking about a web page, a blog post, a product description - whatever, really - the principle remains the same.

If you want your website to rank well for your desired keywords, then it’s a good idea to regularly publish new content on your website/blog. But at the same time, you also want to go back & revisit old blog posts to update them and make sure that the content is as valuable, current and up to date as possible.

This is something I’ve been focusing on recently, here on my own website and blog. Personally, I’ve been going back and updating & improving old posts on my blog and wow, there’s no denying that I’ve already seen major SEO benefits! We’re talking an increase in website traffic, better opt-in rates for my newsletter and freebies, content that ranks higher for my desired keywords, etc. It’s a lot of work but I can already see the impact it’s having so I’m going to stick with it!

But today we’re focusing specifically on BLOGGING - the relationship between blog post publication dates on Squarespace websites and SEO.

And this is perfect because the topic is timely for my own website’s SEO efforts, and it was also a client question during a consulting meeting! Hopefully this post will help out anyone who might be wondering the same thing.

I’m answering this question with a lot of detail here in this post but we’re going to look specifically at whether or not there’s any SEO impact/benefits that comes from changing a blog post’s publication date

One of my favourite things about the publication date of blog posts is the impact it might have from an SEO point of view! That’s right, even something so simple as updating a blog post’s publication date might have a significant SEO effect and may help your website appear higher in search results :)

SEO is hugely valuable because it’s basically free marketing, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to master. Honestly, there are so many moving parts and things to keep track of that it’s no wonder people are scared off by those three little letters.

That’s why I’m so keen to share this post with you today so that you can learn all about changing blog post publication dates and see how much value they have for SEO.

But before we dive into the potential SEO impact of changing Squarespace blog post publication dates, please read instructions/watch the video tutorial on how to actually change the Squarespace blog post’s publication date here.

Remember that SEO is an art, not a science. There’s so much to learn about Squarespace SEO which is why I have written about it a lot - it’s the most popular topic on my blog by far.

SEO can be hella confusing so if you have any questions, you are welcome to leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to respond. I personally work with select consulting and strategy clients every month so if you’re interested in that, please get in touch. I also share SEO tips with my newsletter (which you can sign up for here). Check out my Squarespace SEO page for more resources, blog posts & video tutorials and get your copy of my Squarespace SEO Checklist below for free. Phew!

So let’s take a look, shall we?

SQUARESPACE SEO SERIES

This article is part of my series on Squarespace SEO. I have so many tips to share on the subject that it would have been crazy to put it all in one article! There are many misconceptions about Squarespace SEO which is why I've dedicate so many posts to this topic. Enjoy!

Click to view all posts in the Squarespace SEO Series

Visit my Squarespace SEO page for lots more resources.

Google recrawls previously indexed content

Before we dive too deep on the topic, it’s important to first understand that Google is going to crawl and index your website’s content, but they will also automatically recrawl and reindex previously crawled & indexed content at regular intervals.

Any time you publish content on your website (whether it’s a new page, blog post, product, event, etc.), Google will find, crawl and index it.

When they do this for the first time, they’re also taking note of WHEN this content was published (from the year right down to the minute).

But it’s not a crawl-once-and-done situation… far from it!

Instead, Google regularly and routinely crawls and indexes the content of every website out there - and if they have already crawled your content, then they will re-crawl the page/post and compare it to the last version that they crawled and indexed.

This means that if you go back to an existing blog post and update it, make a few (or many!) changes and improvements to the content, then Google will notice! And once they see that there’s a new version of the content, they will re-index the page/post to account for the changes and updates made.

How often does Google crawl your website?

We’ve already mentioned that Google crawls and indexes the content on your website, but did you know that they will automatically recrawl content, looking for changes? That’s right, these crawls and recrawls happen automatically so you don’t really need to do anything else after you update a post - eventually Google will notice and adjust their records accordingly!

However, many people still ask me how often these crawls happen? When will Google next crawl my website and notice these changes to the content?

This is a question that I get asked ALLLLLL the time and the answer is - it depends :)

The frequency with which Google crawls and indexes your website depends on several factors, but one of the most important factors is how often you publish new content on your website. But generally speaking, you can expect Google to crawl your website about once per month. Obviously if you consistently publish content more often, then Google will come to expect this and therefore their bots will crawl your site more often.

Let’s compare a fairly static services-based business website that pretty much stays the same, occasionally publishing one or two blog posts each month, and compare that to a lifestyle blog which publishes 1+ new post every day for the past few years…. duhhhh Google will crawl the lifestyle blog more often!

So if you make changes to an old blog post, Google will notice at some point, but you can always speed up the process by requesting that Google recrawls your URLs.

Understanding Google’s crawl budget

Alright so now you know that Google will automatically crawl and recrawl your website, and you understand that they’ll make updates to their index whenever they crawl and notice that you’ve got new or updated content.

Along the lines of what we covered above, I also want you to think about a little thing called crawl budget and how that plays into SEO and your Squarespace website.

Google automatically sends out their bots to visit, crawl and index websites but that doesn’t mean every website is treated equally.

Google is going to spend more time crawling sites that have higher domain authority, are more important, bigger, have more robust content, received more traffic, etc. Because of this, it’s really important to that your website is quick to load and that page speed is fast - both factors for SEO and user experience. Because think about it, if you have a relatively large website but it’s still quick to load, then Google can still quickly crawl and index all the content and therefore the content will be updated more often in their indexes.

To give you an idea of what I mean here, think about if you’ve ever seen an old version of your web page or blog post come up in Google’s search results. If you make a change to the page/post, Google’s bot still has to visit the site, crawl the content and re-index it… this doesn’t automatically happen the moment you hit “Save” after making changes to your content! So Google is automatically doing it’s thing but it can’t spend an equal amount of time on every website. This is why it’s so important to signify to Google that they should frequently crawl your website by prioritizing these things:

Regularly publishing new content
Increasing traffic to show them that you’re a popular/influential site
Making sure that pages load quickly

If you do this, Google will be more likely to recrawl and index your site faster.

Phew! Ok now let’s move on to the blogging & dates part of this topic.

Do publication dates show up in search results?

Google doesn’t automatically display a publication date for every web page or blog post that shows up in their search results.

Web pages are considered to be “evergreen” and as such, it wouldn’t make sense to display the publication date here. Think about it, if your website’s Home page shows up in search results, there’s zero value in showing the publication date.

But when it comes to blog posts, however, Google will often show the publication date in search results because it’s considered to be important information and relevant to the user’s search and decision to click through.

Website owners can use this to their advantage, but it can also be a blow against otherwise valuable content if the blog post’s publication date isn’t accurately reflected. You probably don’t want blog post with time-sensitive/current content to be viewed the same way as static, evergreen pages on your website, because you won’t reap the full SEO benefits that way.

This is why it’s so important that Google makes note of the correct publication date for every blog post on your website - especially if you’ve updated/improved the content recently!

One of the ways you can let Google know about the correct publication date of a blog post is to show the clear date directly in the post. If you’re blogging on Squarespace, the post’s publication date is easily set directly in the post editor - and you can update it at any time (more info & instructions on this below). Depending on your display settings, the blog post’s publication date may or may not show up directly in the blog post itself, but you can rest assured that Google is paying attention to the date.

Blog posts, publication dates and Google search results

As you might already have noticed, Google will often display the blog post’s publication date in search results.

Here’s a look at how one of my own blog post about Squarespace index pages and SEO shows up in search results - note the date!

When someone does a Google search, they’re naturally looking for the BEST content on the topic, but they’re also looking for recently published content too!

Some topics are going to be a bit more evergreen and it won’t matter so much when the content was published. But I’d argue that most of the time, people are looking for up to date, recently published content when they do an online search.

Let’s say you’re looking for hotel recommendations and you see two blog posts, one from 2008 and another from 2020. Which one do you think is going to be more useful to you and therefore the link that you’re going to click on? That’s right, it’s probably the recently published blog post. The older blog post might still be very detailed and have a lot of valuable information but it’s inevitable that the situation/landscape/options will be different at the present time and this is why the old post will simply not be as useful to someone who’s doing an online search.

A lot can change in a few years, both on the internet and in real life, and this is why people care so much about when online content was published.

This is why it’s so important to consider the publication date of our own blog posts, especially if we’ve spent lots of time and effort to update & improve the content.

When we update the blog post publication date to accurately reflect all the new changes, updates and higher-value content, it means that we are more likely to take advantage of organic search traffic - because these people are more likely to think that the content and information in the blog post is current, up to date and therefore more valuable to them.

Squarespace blog post publication dates

When you go back to a blog post to update/improve the content, the goal is usually to make it more valuable to Google so that it displays higher in search results for your desired keywords/topics.

There’s enormous SEO value here, but not everyone knows how to update old blog posts correctly - both from a user experience point of view and in Google’s eyes!

This is where it all loops back to our original question - if you update a blog post, should you also change the publication date for SEO benefits?

Google will automatically make note of the original publication date of any page/post, but they also care about the date that it was last modified. They compare the date to what they have stored from their last crawl and index.

Now that you have a better understanding of how Google is crawling and indexing your website content in the first place, let’s take a look at how that applies to blog posts - specifically blog posts that have been updated since their original publication.

Don’t try to fool Google by updating the publication date without actually changing the content

Some people might try to “fool” Google into thinking that the blog post has been changed/updated with new & improved content when in reality, nothing has changed except for the publication date.

Don’t do this!!! You might think you’re being smart and sneaky but actually, it’s just a dumb move - it’s crazy hard to outsmart Google and they’re wise to this little trick.

Think back to what we said earlier about how when Google finds new/updated content on a previously crawled & indexed blog post, they are going to compare the content to the last version of the blog post that they “saw”. So if they see that you’ve changed the blog post publication date but haven’t actually changed the content of the post, you’re not going to see any SEO benefit or value.

If you want the post to rank higher in search results, you need to do a lot more than simply updating the date to make it “newer” content on your website - you’re going to have to make major changes to the post content to improve it and make it higher value.

Changing a blog post’s publication date

Any time that you go back to a blog post and optimize it by making significant content changes, then best practice is so let readers/site visitors know that the bog post has been updated since the original publication date.

The two main ways that you can indicate this are:

Update the main blog post publication date (*only if you’ve made real changes to the content)
Leave the blog post publication date as is, but include an “updated” date within the blog post content

Note: If you change the blog post’s publication date, the blog post will now show up in the archives of the new time. Let’s say a blog post was originally published in April 2018 but in February 2020 you update and optimize the content. If you change the blog post’s publication date to February 2020, then the post will now show up in the blog archives for February 2020 (and not April 2018 as it originally was).

Therefore, if you want the blog post to still show up in the archives for April 2018, then you wouldn’t update the blog post’s publication date to February 2020…. instead, you could add a line of text to the top of the blog post, something like “This blog post was updated in February 2020” so that search engines and readers know that the content is fresh.

Final Thoughts

Now that you see why a blog post’s publication date is so important for SEO, you can decide whether or not you are going to update this information any time you update & optimize website content. The blog post’s publication date might seem like a really small detail but it can majorly impact whether or not people click through to your blog post when it shows up in search results.

Remember, you can read my instructions/watch the video tutorial on how to change a Squarespace blog post’s publication date here.

Put yourself in your ideal audience’s shoes and think about your own behaviour when making an online search. If the publication date of a blog post is a factor that influences how YOU choose which link to click on in search results, then the same can be said for others.

More people clicking over to your website means more website traffic, better conversions and more opportunities to connect with your ideal audience online.

Blogging is a massive pillar of SEO and it’s one of the best ways to create content that search engines can add to their databases for the keywords you want to rank for. Don’t let old blog posts loose momentum or die a slow, painful death because you haven’t touched them in years.

Instead, go back and update/improve/optimize your blog post content to make it current and more valuable to both real people and search engines, and you’ll be more likely to rank higher in search results - that’s SEO at work!

If you want more SEO goodness, be sure to check out my Squarespace SEO page for all resources on the topic.

You can also sign up for my newsletter (right here or below), where I often share Squarespace SEO tips, tricks and high-quality exclusive content. I send out emails to my list every week and while I don’t talk about SEO every time, I can guarantee that you’ll still find the newsletter topics interesting, entertaining and worth your time.

Finally, shameless plug : hit me up with any specific questions you have about Squarespace SEO and your website because I’m your girl. You can reach out to me directly if you’re interested in working together on your website and we can talk about whether or not you would be a good fit for my consulting and ongoing services. I can’t take on every request to do SEO consulting but I do pick a few websites and businesses to work with every month and I’d love for you to be one of them.