Have you ever written a blog post or service page and noticed it doesn’t perform as well as it used to? One possible reason could be the front-end publishing date. During our website audits at Vertz Marketing, we often find that blog posts still show their original publishing date, sometimes as far back as 2019, which can impact performance.
In this article, we will break down the importance of the front-end publishing date and give you some pointers on refreshing your content periodically to maintain freshness for Google.
Key Takeaways
- The “Front-end” publishing date is the date you see displayed as a website viewer.
- Google sometimes uses the “front-end” publishing date in the SERPs, which can either work to your benefit or harm your SEO.
- Changing your publishing date to display “last updated” is the best practice for SEO, as it will reflect the freshness of your work.
- Having outdated publishing dates in your blogs is a bad signal to Google directly, and it also lowers your click rate as a web browser likely wants to avoid clicking on a post that is dated.
- To display the last update rather than the publishing date, you will need to look into your theme settings and alsocheck your page builders, as the settings could be located there.
- There is a plugin that will do this for you, and in most instances, it is called WP Last-Modifed.
- Always back up your website before testing any of these settings.
What Is A Front-End Publishing Date?
The front-end publishing date is the visible date on a blog or service page, typically found at the top near the author name, categories, tags, and the featured image. The section is known as the post metadata or meta section.
What Not To Do
The biggest mistake we see at our Milwaukee SEO agency is when the website owner goes in and manually changes the publishing date inside of WordPress.
This is a red flag to Google, as Google can see what was changed in your document. If you have changed anything and you’re simply just trying to win freshness by changing the date, you will likely end up tanking your rankings.
Another mistake we see is leaving the publishing date there because you don’t think the publishing date matters to the reader. When you put yourself in the reader’s shoes, you will notice that you want to see relevant and fresh content rather than a page from 2018 or 2019.
Additionally, if you leave all of these dates on your website and you’re not publishing a bunch of new content, Google will see this as a “dead” site and think the webmaster has given up on the website.
What To Do
If you’re looking to utilize the front-end publishing date to secure higher rankings in Google, we recommend the following:
- Display last updated: To do this, you can utilize your theme settings to display the last update, download the lastmodified plugin, or utilize a page builder.
- Ensure that you are making significant updates each time you edit a page so that it looks natural to search engines.
- Surf through your blog and service pages to ensure that an older publishing date is not being displayed. You can use this to decide whether a page is still relevant and should either be deleted or no-indexed. This is commonly known as “blog pruning,” and it is excellent practice for those looking to improve their rankings and crawl budget.
Does The Front-End Publishing Date Always Match The Back-End Date?
Most SEO plugins use two meta tags to show search engines the publish and modified date: “published_time” and “modified_time.” Unfortunately, for many themes, there is no toggle to only display the Last Modified date easily and requires custom code. Whichever date your page or posts renders with when loaded is typically the date Google will show in the SERP, or search engine results page.
If you’re wondering when viewing your source code on a specific page, why the front-end date is displaying an old publishing date, yet the source code is showing the last-modified date, which is current, it is because your theme is showing your publish date and your SEO plugin, like Rankmath or Yoast, is displaying the “last-modified.”
In some cases, you can use a plugin to do this. Otherwise, you will need to modify your child theme. In most cases, you will need to modify functions.php, but this will depend on your specific theme. If you’re not already using a child theme (we strongly recommend you do), you can either use the one that came with your theme or grab a Child Theme Generator plugin from the WordPress repository. Using a child theme allows you to make custom changes to your site that will not be overwritten when you update your theme.
Many theme developers provide detailed documentation on how to display the last modified date if it isn’t available in your Theme Options. A quick Google search for “[Theme Name + Last Modified]” will likely bring up an article or tutorial, especially if you’re using a popular theme, that explains how to add this feature.
The popular Astra theme can display the last updated date by adding the following custom code to functions.php. Make sure you back up your website with your host before modifying any theme files.
/**
* Display only last modified date in the post metadata.
*
* @param String $output Markup for the last modified date.
* @return void
*/
function your_prefix_post_date( $output ) {
$output = '';
$format = apply_filters( 'astra_post_date_format', '' );
$modified_date = esc_html( get_the_modified_date( $format ) );
$modified_on = sprintf(
esc_html( '%s' ),
$modified_date
);
$output .= '';
$output .= ' ' . $modified_on . '';
$output .= '';
return $output;
}
add_filter( 'astra_post_date', 'your_prefix_post_date' );An SEO or marketing agency can assist you if you encounter any issues adding code to your theme yourself.
The Importance Of Displaying Your Last Updated Date Instead Of The Original Publishing Date
Having a current date at the top of your post is vital in today’s digital landscape, with many companies keeping hyper-current information. Since Google often pulls the date displayed on your website and not from your source code, you directly hurt your rankings by showing an older date in the SERPs.