One-Date Logic Bullshit

Are you changing the date of pages to make them appear fresh when the content has not been substantially updated? If you follow Raptive's advice, you're doing this!

By now, you have to know Raptive, and essentially ALL display networks are full of shit. While I was running an AI training model, I wrote this historical piece on Raptive, and what I’ve seen and experienced over the years helping owners.

It's interesting how everything Raptive quotes as a success (increase in pageviews) has the opposite effect in the long term. And I have no doubt this date-change nonsense will follow the same pattern.

Let’s start with Creating Helpful Content, and we all know that HCU demolished businesses that failed to meet these basic requirements. It's worth noting that HCU was merged into Core Updates in March 2024.

Raptives’ recommendation directly contradicts the following:

Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?

Welcome to the Raptive SEO shitshow!

Anyone who works in SEO daily knows that Google prioritizes the first date. The above is resolved by swapping:

Published: August 15, 2019 - Modified: February 10, 2025

to

Modified: February 10, 2025 - Published: August 15th, 2019

But if we’re talking best practices, it’s more like

By Grant Mucha (full name links to fully qualified author profile)
Updated Jun. 27th, 2025, Published May. 19th, 2022

The following will, on average, end in disaster.

Raptive’s keen on freshness, yet has no understanding of how Google operates, crawls, indexes, and ranks content.

Messing with dates, faking dates, while trying to increase rankings, never ends well in the long term. You might get a temporary boost from gaming freshness, inflating CTR, but in the end, it’ll hurt long-term performance.

Best case scenario you want to feed search significant updates, one after another, and create a historical pattern that clearly states your not a piece of shit, spamming, gaming, etc.

Raptive cherry-picked one point from Google and skewed it as advertising companies typically do: “Minimize the presence of other dates on the page: If you’ve followed the best practices and find incorrect dates are being selected, consider removing some or all other dates that appear on the page.”

Google’s Best Practices:

1. The date is required; the time is not: However, we recommend you provide a time and timezone in markup for added precision. (done by WordPress)

2. If you choose to specify the timezone, provide the correct timezone, taking into account daylight saving time as appropriate. (done by WordPress)

3. Make your dates and times consistent. Ensure that the date (and optional time and timezone) match between the equivalent user-visible and structured values. Time and timezone are optional in user-visible data even if provided in structured data. (DONE BY WORDPRESS)

4. Don't specify future dates, or the date of the action described on the page. The dates must describe the publication or update date of the page, not the stories or events described therein. You can add Event markup to the page to describe the activities listed on the page, if you like. (no shit, N/A)

Stop here, you’re only intended to execute five IF something is broken.

5. Minimize the presence of other dates on the page: If you've followed the best practices and find incorrect dates are being selected, consider removing some or all other dates that appear on the page. (Raptive excluded 1-4, and twisted this into something it’s not)

How to provide date information to Google:

1. Follow 1-4 outlined above.

2. Add a user-visible date to the page and feature it prominently. Label your dates appropriately with text like "Publish" or "Last updated". Here are some examples of how you can highlight date information about a web page:

   • Posted Feb 4, 2019

   • Published February 4, 2019

   • Last updated: Feb 14, 2018

   • Updated Feb 14, 2019 8pm ET

3. Specify dates with structured data. We recommend that you add a subtype of CreativeWork (such as Article, BlogPosting, or VideoObject), and specify the datePublished and/or dateModified fields. Be sure to follow Google's structured data guidelines to help our crawlers understand your article dates.

Critical Note:

“Minimize the presence of other dates on the page: If you've followed the best practices and find incorrect dates are being selected, consider removing some or all other dates that appear on the page.”

This is only recommended IF your website, system, or theme is broken, and we need to identify the root cause, fix the issue, and then strategically recover points 1-4, which includes prominently displaying a user-visible date.

Business Critical

If you update your theme and the dates change (and they will), your update was trivial and does not reflect a significant quality change; you're sending the wrong signals and creating a historically weak pattern.

Worse yet, Raptive advertises this as a means to boost SEO and traffic, which is precisely why you shouldn’t do it; everything about this is wrong.

And people wonder why they struggle with crawling and indexing, or worse, end up in a negative ranking state for months or years.

A date should only be changed when you significantly improve content, reinforcing a clear pattern of exceptional quality across updates and new content.

The 7-day grace period, mentioned by Raptive, was only designed to facilitate easy adjustments for creators after publication.

On average, this is what happens:

1. Owner executes Raptive’s changes, either DIY or through dev

2. Devs likely say no, the owner makes the executive decision.

3. Owner decides to execute, regardless of warnings.

4. Within a week, the vast majority of content reflects the updated date (fake)

   1. fake means, gaming freshness, gaming CTR

   2. fake means, changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed

   3. fake means, gaining temporary boosts in ranking and traffic

5. This will significantly increase your chances of a negative ranking state and long-term traffic loss.

With all of the AI slop bombarding search engines at unprecedented levels, search engines are growing excessively hostile to efforts designed to manipulate search.

We’ve seen a significant increase in both indexed and noindexed sites and content. We’ve seen sites flagged with real-time HCU penalties, and I do not recommend poking the bear.

Personal Note

It’s becoming increasingly evident that owners who rely on free information or attempt to do everything themselves are consistently frustrated and often fail to grow their businesses.

Free often implies there is an angle being played, think Raptive, think Facebook groups, think free masterminds. Unfortunately, the angle ends up doing more harm than the free advice meant to help.

Or worse, it’s naturally toxic. The number of times I’ve read comments on Facebook advising other business owners to do nothing is unreal. Meanwhile, every successful business owner I know does the exact opposite.

Do it yourself sounds great until you're 20 hours deep, frustrated, and staring at something that's only half-done and will never work right, and you’ve done none of the things business owners and specifically creators should be doing.

Everything ultimately circles back to a business owner’s ability to make informed decisions, execute, and consistently stack quality.

Owners need someone who is consistently in their corner. Pick whoever you’re happy with, but pick someone you want to work with long-term and grow your business.

The owners I work with, growing, month over month, year over year, rely on the following:

There are effectively three things owners need to focus on to grow consistently:

1. Business

2. Brand

3. Content

Any owner who lacks these core components cannot be helped. It’s your business, you have to make decisions, execute, and stay consistent.

Imagine not having to worry about everything else!

1. hosting, 99th percentile

2. software/layouts, meticulous

3. wordpress, theme, plugin updates

4. off-site, data-driven authority building

5. seo, consistently helping owners stack quality

Critical Difference

I get paid by you, I work for you, I win for you, repeat. If you need help, I’m happy to connect; however, ultimately, find someone who helps you WIN and fills your knowledge gaps.

I’ve done this long enough that both my record and references speak for themselves. Here are 29 year-over-year growth cases I took last week.

On that note, I’m off to the gym and then heading camping for the weekend. If you want to focus on your business and offload everything else, feel free to book a call.

Have a great weekend!
Cheers,
Grant