Is Publishing Articles with a Back Date Fine?

In order to keep my best articles at the top of the homepage I tend to publish a lot of articles with a back date. For example, I might publish a post today but set the date to say 6 months ago.

Also, when I update an article I tend not to update the date on it.

So I see how people speak about freshness being a thing and Im wondering whether this could be harming my website?

Like does Google know that Im constantly adding and updating articles even though that the date on the article is say 6months ago?

Also, please note that the date is not displayed on my posts and Google doesn't show it in serps so it doesn't affect my CTR in a negative manner for sure.

I will appreciate any help

if the date isn't displayed it won't make a difference. google will probably decide on its own based on when it found the post(s).

I do this for PBNs and all good, not sure about real sites. But in term of ranking, will be no change for sure, it's all about cache.

Google uses the date they first see the article. They don't fall for this.

The article date is just for display purposes.

You can do it but don’t expect any ranking boost from it

Thank you everyone! I was thinking the same but wanted to make sure. Also when I look at my sitemap I can see a date that says when the article was updated so I guess Google can clearly see when an article was updated anyway.

Thanks again I guess we can close this thread unless someone else has a different opinion on this

I don't think that's a problem. If there is a published date then google will consider that but if there isn't one google decides itself and i think it displays the date on which it got published. From SEO POV it doesn't make a difference except your article is about top websites in 2020 and the published date is 2019.

Should be fine for PBN

It doesn't matter much, no effect on Google ranking.
But to be sure they're being indexed, check the Google cache of those respective pages