Backdated content and G

Just a quick question...

You see a lot of guides on here that say you should postdate and backdate content posts on blogs and websites, and this question applies mainly to backdated content: Does G know the ACTUAL date that the content was added to your website?

For example if I write an article on 23/10/14 and date it 01/10/2011, does G know that it was added after 2011 and has been backdated? Obviously if the article was posted on a new domain then it could be noticed, but what if the domain is older than the backdated article date?

For post dated articles the article is usually automatically posted on the specified dats so G wouldn't know when it was written I suppose.

If the bots crawled your site, Google will know when the content was added.

jeebu5 said:

Just a quick question...

You see a lot of guides on here that say you should postdate and backdate content posts on blogs and websites, and this question applies mainly to backdated content: Does G know the ACTUAL date that the content was added to your website?

For example if I write an article on 23/10/14 and date it 01/10/2011, does G know that it was added after 2011 and has been backdated? Obviously if the article was posted on a new domain then it could be noticed, but what if the domain is older than the backdated article date?

For post dated articles the article is usually automatically posted on the specified dats so G wouldn't know when it was written I suppose.

Click to expand...

Not sure about that one, I think Greg is probably right though.

When Google crawl your website first time, that date is count as article posting day in Google eyes.

Just dont Backdate your content to a Date on before buying your domain or 2002 or 1994

Google has it's own methods to find the article date whatever you do, i'm sure it checks the domain age too as many other services do. Why should google do that if others can. And yes if it crawls your article he will get in consideration the article date even if you change it to whatever date you want.

I thought as much. Thanks everyone for your inputs.

I'm not so convinced that Google considers the date of first crawl to be the date of content being added.

If you think of all the data that Google would need to keep about each crawl, you might take the view that it's simply too much data to record, especially when extrapolated across the internet.

They would need to record the crawl path, what links were present, and then keep an 'image' of that data and compare future crawls against it. How many crawl images would be kept? And for how long? And how many versions would be compared against each other?
It starts to become a mammoth undertaking, when you consider the data that is required to determine the date of content being added. Don't forget also, that an article might well have been crawled, but simply not indexed the previous time.

I really don't know the answer here - but when you think about it in depth, it kinda wouldn't surprise me if back-dated posts on WP were a good thing

It's on my list of things to test properly - when we do, I'll update this thread.