reminder: update your content dates for the new year

Thought I’d send a short email this week to remind you to update content dates on your site for the new year. We emailed about this 12 months ago and again, throughout our SEO audits this year we saw content with dates for previous years.

This is very common on content or affiliate sites and sites that run events or are posting content that is relating to specific dates.

Dates are an important part of Google’s algorithm and is heavily relied upon by ChatGPT and LLMs and as soon as the clock ticks over to the new year, your content with 2025 in the date will see a drop off in performance, both in terms of ranking and click through rate as searches will click on newer dated content.

A simple way to audit for this type of content is using Google search itself by running the search:

“2025” site:domain.com

For the example:

“2025” site:wpspeedfix.com

This will return posts with the date 2025 in them.

The date will need to be updated in several places like the title tag, h1 heading tag and the content itself. For highly competitive content it may also be worth updating the publish date too so old dates aren’t showing in the search results like above. For obsolete and old content, most often the solution is to just delete it and let it 404 out. In some cases, if the post is still getting traffic, redirecting it to another relevant post may be a better option.

If you have a bigger site or want to take this to the next level, using Screaming Frog SEO Spider and its custom search function will crawl your site and look for the strings you tell it to search, for example “2024” in SEO title tags. Detailed instructions are here

Thats it for this email, any questions, just hit reply – if you’re stuck with site speed or need help with SEO, email me back with some background on the problem you’re looking to solve and we can send over some recommendations.