Which pages actually need updating

Where freshness matters

Subjects that genuinely change. Prices and costs. Rules, thresholds and deadlines. Anything about a product or tool that gets updated.

Searches with an implied recency, where somebody wants what is true now rather than what was true.

For those, an out of date page is worse than no page, because it gives a confident wrong answer to somebody who trusted you.

• Prices and costs
• Rules, thresholds and deadlines
• Anything naming a year
• Product or tool specifics that get updated
• Anything where being out of date gives a confident wrong answer
• Searches with an implied recency

Where it does not

Explanations of things that do not change. How a process works. What a term means. Why something is done a particular way.

For those subjects an older page that answers thoroughly consistently outperforms a newer one that answers adequately.

Rewriting a good stable page to look fresh is effort that would earn more spent on a page that has nothing on it.

For stable subjects an older page that answers thoroughly consistently beats a newer one that answers adequately.

Why changing the date does nothing

A displayed date is a claim about the content. Changing it while the content stays the same is a claim that is not true, and engines compare the content rather than the label.

Bulk updating dates across a site is a recognized pattern and it does not produce the effect people expect.

It also costs you the ability to tell, later, which pages you actually reviewed and which you merely touched.

The date should follow a real change. If nothing changed, the date should not either.

Engines compare the content rather than the label, and bulk updating dates costs you the ability to tell later which pages you actually reviewed.

What a real update involves

Reading the page as a customer. Checking every figure, every rule and every recommendation against what is true now.

Adding what is missing, cutting what no longer applies, and improving the answer where the question has moved on.

That is a substantive change worth signalling. It also usually improves the page enough to be worth doing for its own sake.

The honest version takes an hour per page and produces a better page. The dishonest version takes a second and produces the same page with a newer date on it.

Deciding what to revisit

Look at the performance report for pages that used to earn impressions and no longer do. A decline on a stable subject often means the answer has aged.

Then look at pages carrying numbers, deadlines or rules. Those are the ones where being wrong costs a reader something.

Keep a list of pages containing anything dated. That list is your review schedule and it takes an hour to build once.

Keep a list of every page carrying a number or a deadline. That list is the review, and without it the review never quite happens.

Pages that used to earn impressions and no longer do are the first place to look, and the report that shows it is covered in the performance report.

Rewriting versus replacing

Update the existing page rather than publishing a new one on the same subject. A new page competes with the old and splits everything the old page earned.

Where the subject has changed enough that the old page is about something else, redirect it to the new one rather than leaving both.

Keeping the same address is what preserves the links, the standing and the history.

Where a page splits into two genuinely different subjects, keep the original at its address for the larger half and give the smaller half a new page linked from it.

Update the existing page rather than publishing a new one on the same subject, or the two compete — see cannibalization.

How ours handle dates

Every page on a site built here carries a modification date taken from the page's own content rather than from the moment of the last build.

That means the date changes when something actually changed, and the sitemap reflects the same thing, so the signal stays meaningful.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

That also means the sitemap's dates stay meaningful, which is the signal the field exists to carry and the one most sites destroy by stamping every page at build time.