SEO question: Is it okay to change post dates on a web page?

Sente

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I am updating a WordPress install. A big makeover.

Is it okay to change dates on posts, say from 2009 to 2012 (so it doesn't look so old)? Does Google care?
 
Google doesn't care, in fact this is a very common thing when upgrading websites to a knew design or platform.

They won't read the post date unless you specifically tell them as follows:

Code:
 Published on<time itemprop="date" datetime="2009-07-18">July 18th, 2009</time>

And in the meta content of the page:

Code:
<meta name="pdate" content="20090718">

With that, then it will appear as such in SERPS.

iDUAS


However, it shouldn't positively or negatively affect your results (I don't think) unless someone searches using advanced functions within Google Search.
 
I am updating a WordPress install. A big makeover.

Is it okay to change dates on posts, say from 2009 to 2012 (so it doesn't look so old)? Does Google care?

Nope, assuming that your blog is not setup to use the dates in the url field (in which case) I would leave them alone. Also if you wanted to you can manually go in and edit out the date in posts all together, you can search on google for exactly how to do that, but it involves editing the custom theme files for your templete.
 
Should be okay, but if those posts have SEO juice either keep the old URLs or use a 301 redirect to the new ones.
 
It is okay unless the dates are included in the permalinks. If they are, you'll need to make some re-directions.
 
It should not be much of a problem, and this happens updating the blogs is very common.
 
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