Automatically Republish Posts?

[ew3]

I noticed my competitors all update their published dates on their posts at the same time every month. Is there a plug-in I can use to do this too? It seems they are out ranking me based on having “fresher” content (even though the content is not being changed at all).

 

[Ryuzaki]

This plugin "Bulk Post Update Date" by Atiq Samtia works perfectly. You can update the last modified or the publish date, and make it randomized between two dates, etc.

 

[ew3]

Awesome, thanks for the link - really appreciate it. Any idea what works best? i.e. updating last modified or publish date, or any other best practices for doing this? I've heard it can be risky but seeing as how I'm being outranked by people who are doing it I figure it can't be that risky.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I ran a fairly extensive test on this a while back in this thread: Publish Date, Last Updated, Query Deserves Freshness, & Google Fresh Rank

Ultimately, my conclusion was updating the content didn't matter, and I don't like republishing for organization nor doe that really trick Google. Updating the "last modified" date is the correct practice and is the only date I show on the page. I show both published and modified dates in the meta data via Yoast.