Welcome to the blog millionaire, where we break down the essential strategies of today's most successful bloggers

to take your blog to the next level with top-notch content, monumental traffic growth, and multiple revenue streams to go beyond your wildest goals.

So get ready to blog like a pro and make your traffic explode with your host, whose blog gets more than one million visitors every single month, Brandon Galey.

My name's Brandon Galey and welcome to episode 131 of the blog millionaire.

Over the next five episodes, I'm going to answer some big SEO questions

that bloggers are frequently asking. So let's go ahead and get right into the first question.

When is it okay to update your published date from a couple of years ago to today's date.

Google recently said the following on this topic.

If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give a fresh date and time.

However, do not artificially freshhen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening.

The easiest way to address this is to look at the updated post through the eyes of someone who has read the original post. If the changes are

substantial enough to warrant the person to reread the post a second time, then you should

update your published date to today's date. For things like title changes, image additions,

and alt tag updates, you should not adjust the published date. When you add a new section or are making adjustments to content

that is no longer relevant, then that also would warrant making a change to the published date.

There are three reasons why you should be updating old posts so that you can change the date to the current date.

Reason number one, you will get a temporary burst of organic search engine traffic.

Google likes to push posts with fresh dates up to the first page of Google rankings. This usually will last anywhere from a

day to a couple of weeks. If you are ranking on the second page, then this might give you a chance

to prove yourself worthy of staying on the first page.

Reason number two. You can get a long-term rankings increase from getting your post

clicked on more often than the rest of the results showing up for that specific keyword phrase.

...