How important is the date you use on your content? According to my research,
it's very important. In fact, it almost cost me 1.1 million visits.
On May 14th, organic search traffic dropped from 8,600 daily visits to 5,400
visits. Where did the traffic go?
Some said it was due to bot/ fake traffic.
Others said it was because of a new cookie policy.
But, I didn't believe it.
I ran numerous tests, rewrote some of the page code and requested indexing from
Google Search Console - yet none of it worked.
Over the next few weeks, traffic remained down and SEMrush reported that we'd
lost rankings for than 7,000 keywords!
So, what happened?
In the end, it was simple - the publish date was wrong.
During a site migration, the "Last updated" date was replaced with the "First
published" date - meaning, over 80% of content appeared outdated, especially to
Google.
We experimented with both “First published” and “Last updated”, but that didn’t
have any impact.
It wasn’t until we removed “First published” that traffic began to climb again.
Today, more than two months later, traffic and keyword rankings have resumed to
previous levels – all because of “Last updated”.
When was your content last updated?
#Marketing #ContentStrategy #SEO
it's very important. In fact, it almost cost me 1.1 million visits.
On May 14th, organic search traffic dropped from 8,600 daily visits to 5,400
visits. Where did the traffic go?
Some said it was due to bot/ fake traffic.
Others said it was because of a new cookie policy.
But, I didn't believe it.
I ran numerous tests, rewrote some of the page code and requested indexing from
Google Search Console - yet none of it worked.
Over the next few weeks, traffic remained down and SEMrush reported that we'd
lost rankings for than 7,000 keywords!
So, what happened?
In the end, it was simple - the publish date was wrong.
During a site migration, the "Last updated" date was replaced with the "First
published" date - meaning, over 80% of content appeared outdated, especially to
Google.
We experimented with both “First published” and “Last updated”, but that didn’t
have any impact.
It wasn’t until we removed “First published” that traffic began to climb again.
Today, more than two months later, traffic and keyword rankings have resumed to
previous levels – all because of “Last updated”.
When was your content last updated?
#Marketing #ContentStrategy #SEO