Does publishing date matter for Google?

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kopur480

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I'm going to publish 100 articles in a newly created blog on my website to rank on different keywords. Can I use different publishing dates distributed over the past 6 months to make an impression that this is not mass content published at once?

Or if Google didn't see them during previous indexing and now sees them, it will consider today's date for all of them?

What does it look at: crawling date or publishing date visible on the website?
 
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kopur480 said:
Or if Google didn't see them during previous indexing and now sees them, it will consider today's date for all of them?
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yeah, I think this...

kopur480 said:
What does it look at: crawling date or publishing date visible on the website?
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both and more.

If you use Wordpress and have a plugin for scheduling posts use it to schedule 1 post per day / week / whatever schedule you want and don't worry about publishing dates!

Just make sure that once in a while you update some of that content with new info where appropriate.
 
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Yes, publication date can be important to Google when it comes to fresh information. But the real value in overall ranking is quality and updated content.
 
kopur480 said:
I'm going to publish 100 articles in a newly created blog on my website to rank on different keywords. Can I use different publishing dates distributed over the past 6 months to make an impression that this is not mass content published at once?

Or if Google didn't see them during previous indexing and now sees them, it will consider today's date for all of them?

What does it look at: crawling date or publishing date visible on the website?
Click to expand...
I’ve tested published bulk content with old dates, and Google still treated everything as new pages based on crawl/index time, not the date shown on the site.

How i work
  • Publishing in batches (10 at a time)
  • Building internal link
 
Google places more faith in the very first time that they find and crawl the page than what the published date is. It is hard for backdating to be effective since Google will see when the pages have been crawled and linked. Therefore, backdating 100 different articles will not be helpful.
 
Yes, it's necessary to schedule posts instead of dumping them at once. It's better to schedule them to a future date instead of publishing everything at once with a past date. You should also update published posts for recrawl.
 
Yes, the time when the post is published is important, and sometimes it works, but when I was making blogs, I noticed something: if the Google crawler comes out of nowhere and sees the blog empty, or finds the posts before you've changed their dates, it will know the dates are false and treat them as manipulated, which can affect your rankings. Also, if the posts are older than the domain age, that's still an issue.

What I did before was create a plugin that auto-approves 1, 2, or 3 posts per day at random times, so there's no pattern, and not the same number of posts each day. It's much safer that way.

If you want to change the dates, try not to go much further back than the domain age, or more than 2 weeks. Somehow, Google knows about all new domains the moment someone buys them. It happened to me even with freshly bought domains — never used, random names — and within 1–2 hours, Google bots were already crawling them.
 
Google is much smarter than just looking at the date printed on the page. They primarily look at the fist crawl date, the very first time their bot discovers the URL. If you drop 100 pages today with backdated timestamps from six months ago, Google will still see that all 100 URLs appeared on their radar for the first time today.
 
In fact, Google prioritizes the 'crawling date' over the C.M.S publication date for initial indexing, so backdating won't deceive the algorithm. It is far more effective to drip-feed your content over the next month to ensure a steady crawling frequency and avoid triggering 'mass-generated content' flags
 
Backdating 100 posts won’t fool Google—it mainly trusts when it first crawls and indexes your pages, not just the date you display, so bulk-publishing then faking older dates still looks like new content.
 
Backdating won’t really fool Google if it crawls them now, it treats them as new anyway.
 
Backdating publish dates won’t really fool Google what matters more is when the pages are first crawled and indexed.

If all 100 go live at once, Google will likely treat them as fresh content regardless of the visible date.

Better approach: stagger publishing naturally and focus on quality + internal linking for stronger results.
 
Yes but it’s a weak signal; Google cares more about when it finds and evaluates the content.
 
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