Change dates of WordPress posts

Royal96 · Jun 21, 2022

Hey guys,

I want to change the dates of some of my WordPress posts. The reason is that I want to display the best ones on the homepage. Also, on the category pages the best ones should come first.

I know that I could use sticky posts as well. But with this option all the sticky posts are displayed + the posts that would be on the page anyways. With the regular dates that wouldn't be the case and I could easily arrange them however I want.

Now, my question is: Could doing this have any effect on the rankings or basically reset the publishing dates (article age) from Google's perspective?

I'm using a plugin to hide date, author, etc. So, the indexed articles don't have any dates attached to them in the SERPs. They're not showing up.

SirLouen · Jun 21, 2022

Royal96 said:
Now, my question is: Could doing this have any effect on the rankings or basically reset the publishing dates (article age) from Google's perspective?

No issues, in fact, sometimes posts see an improvement (there are even some plugins that auto update dates to show some kind of freshness)
This doesn't apply to all niches but is good to know

PS: If I were you I would edit a little bit your front page to use other mechanisms to put featured posts on top. This method is time consuming, unless you use a plugin with cronjob that does this for you, and still I don't see it a great method.
Instead of using an archive for front page, use an static page and use some plugin like WP Show Posts that makes this possible kind of easy.

notNewB · Jun 21, 2022

+1 for WP Show Posts and going for a static page.

Also, you'll have to change your articles' published date if you want them to be on top by date. Tweaking something and hitting that update button will change the Last Modified date which won't affect their placement order. And I recommend not touching the published date without doing any major changes to the article.

Royal96 · Jun 21, 2022

SirLouen said:
No issues, in fact, sometimes posts see an improvement (there are even some plugins that auto update dates to show some kind of freshness)
This doesn't apply to all niches but is good to know

PS: If I were you I would edit a little bit your front page to use other mechanisms to put featured posts on top. This method is time consuming, unless you use a plugin with cronjob that does this for you, and still I don't see it a great method.
Instead of using an archive for front page, use an static page and use some plugin like WP Show Posts that makes this possible kind of easy.

notNewB said:
+1 for WP Show Posts and going for a static page.

Also, you'll have to change your articles' published date if you want them to be on top by date. Tweaking something and hitting that update button will change the Last Modified date which won't affect their placement order. And I recommend not touching the published date without doing any major changes to the article.

Thank you, guys!

I might use WP Show Posts in the future as I wanted to create a static page sooner or later anyway. But for now, I want to keep the website structure like this (blogroll).

In my case, I want to make the posts sticky on the homepage as well as on the category pages. I see that the sticky function in WordPress doesn't apply to categories. What plugin using cronjob you talked about can do this? And yes, I wanted to change the dates through edit/quick edit. But, when you say it's better not to change them unless the articles were edited, I avoid doing it.

Royal96 · Jun 21, 2022

Sometimes we make our lives more complicated than it needs to be

I found a plugin that does exactly what I was looking for:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-types-order/

blackbeans · Jun 24, 2022

If I were you, I would just do away with dates unless you are in a niche that is date or time-dependent.

Focus more on what you're trying to say and what your target audience members are looking for in terms of initial content that they can come back to.

Focus along those lines because you are obsessing about dates.

It might interfere with your audience's perception of the quality of your blog brand and what it might say when they Google it.

Change dates of WordPress posts

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