“If you update an old blog post, should you change the ‘published date’? Are there any SEO benefits for doing this?”

This is a question that came up recently during a Squarespace SEO Audit & Consulting client meeting and I figured since this topic has come up before, it’s worth creating a blog post about it to help out the rest of my audience - that would be YOU, my lovely little website & SEO nerds :)

When it comes to SEO and ranking high for your desired keywords/key terms, we can all agree that Google (and other search engines) favour both new AND refreshed/updated content. This is pretty much true across the board.

If we think back to the very basics of SEO and how Google decides what content to return in search results, it always comes back to the best and highest quality content on the internet.

Whether we’re talking about a web page, a blog post, a product description - whatever, really - the principle remains the same.

If you want your website to rank well for your desired keywords, then it’s a good idea to regularly publish new content on your website/blog. But at the same time, you also want to go back & revisit old blog posts to update them and make sure that the content is as valuable, current and up to date as possible.

This is something I’ve been focusing on recently, here on my own website and blog. Personally, I’ve been going back and updating & improving old posts on my blog and wow, there’s no denying that I’ve already seen major SEO benefits! We’re talking an increase in website traffic, better opt-in rates for my newsletter and freebies, content that ranks higher for my desired keywords, etc. It’s a lot of work but I can already see the impact it’s having so I’m going to stick with it!

But today we’re focusing specifically on BLOGGING - the relationship between blog post publication dates on Squarespace websites and SEO.

And this is perfect because the topic is timely for my own website’s SEO efforts, and it was also a client question during a consulting meeting! Hopefully this post will help out anyone who might be wondering the same thing.

I’m answering this question with a lot of detail here in this post but we’re going to look at two things:

1. Whether or not there’s any SEO impact/benefits that comes from changing a blog post’s publication date

2. Instructions on how to actually change the blog post’s publication date.

So let’s take a look, shall we?