Key Learning
- A visible date significantly influences the byline date on Google SERP.
- For content that remains relevant over a long period and won’t be updated frequently, it’s better not to display the publish date to prevent evergreen content from appearing outdated.
- Content freshness isn’t always relevant.
- Changes in content presentation can significantly impact user engagement and search engine rankings. Always test changes before a full rollout.
Background
I noticed some of our competitors that outrank us have a byline date on SERPs. My hypothesis is that a visible publish date would signal to both users and search engines that the content is timely and relevant.
Therefore, in order to potentially improve our visibility on Google and the CTR, we decided to display the publish date on all articles – hoping we can get the byline date.
Wait, what is a byline date?
A byline date refers to the date displayed next to the title or snippet of a web page in the search results. This date indicates when the content was published or last updated.
It helps users assess the recency and potential relevance of the content to their query.
How to influence the publish date on Google SERP
According to Google guidelines, there are two major steps to help Google determine the publication dates: displaying a clear date on the page and using structured data.
The first method is to make sure the publication date is prominently visible. Normally it’s positioned between the title and the body of the article. And you should minimise other dates on the same page.
Alternatively, you can implement structured data using the datePublished and dateModified in your schema markup. This structured data should be in the ISO 8601 format, including the correct time zone designator, to provide explicit date information to Google.
What was done
On our webpages, we already have the datePublished and dateModified in our schema markup – however, Google doesn’t display this information. Therefore, we worked with the UX team to make the date of publication visible.
We rolled out the publish date to all of our pages regardless of their date of publish (unfortunately, in our cases, some are published more than 2 years).
Results
When the publish date was visible on the page, the byline date was shown on the SERP.
The organic traffic dropped by -13.37% within one week after the rollout of the publish date visibility feature. After rolling back the change, clicks recovered by 10.10% compared to the previous week.
In terms of organic rankings, we don’t see a major fluctuation – in fact, 72% of keywords remained stable with no change in position (based on Ahrefs data). Only 0.20% of ranking keywords drop out of Top 3 while 0.54% of ranking keywords drop out of Top 10 position.
If we only analyse keywords that show any sign of change, we can see that there are more keywords with small position changes, both positive and negative, and fewer keywords with large position changes. However, it could just be a normal ranking fluctuation.
Conclusion – Does content freshness impact SEO?
The implementation of a visible publish date had mixed effects on our website’s organic traffic.
Based on our findings, it appears that content freshness is not always important in affecting search rankings and it largely depends on the type of search query. Of course, if you are targeting trending topics that require up-to-date information, publish date will matter.
In our case, even though we observed a slight decrease in terms of organic ranking, the overall rankings are not heavily impacted. Some of the content outranks pages that are published on a later date – suggesting Google doesn’t always favour newer content.
However, content freshness significantly impacts click-through rates (CTR) by influencing how users perceive the relevance and timeliness of the information provided. Users are less interested in clicking on a page if the publish date appears to be outdated even though the page is still ranking on the first page of SERPs.
This is a great lesson for me – always remember to test any changes before and keep monitoring the results afterwards. If possible, carry out a A/B test to avoid any drastic impact on your overall traffic.
