Backdating Articles: Is It Good For Your Site?

It’s every business owner’s dream to see his website sitting on top of his competitors’ pages. This doesn’t only ensure more potential leads or customers, but it likewise builds supremacy among the others. It’s therefore not a surprise how people come up with different SEO strategies to accomplish this. Probably one of the most used tactics is backdating.

What is backdating?

As the name suggests, backdating involves changing the date of an article or a blog post to an earlier date that way it looks older. The rationale behind this is that people tend to trust web content which has been visible online for quite some time. Since SEO is well regarded to side more on age, backdating, for many, would sound like a cool tool to use.

One legitimate reason to use backdating is when you’re moving a site. Even if you’ve kept a copy of your blog content, their original post dates are often lost after the transition. In order to remedy this, you can edit the post date to try and put a site back to the way it was. That’s, of course, assuming you still have access to all the relevant information.

How do search engines deal with backdating?

While it’s relatively easy for web administrators to post hundreds of articles with random old dates, Google and the rest of the search engines are quite unconvinced. In fact, they don’t mind if you have your articles posted three or five years ago. They care more about how old your website is as a whole.

In short, search engines gain the trust of your website by monitoring how it’s been performing in its entire lifespan.

Downside of backdating

We understand how backdating can be beneficial to those who are moving sites. Expectedly, there are a lot who have exploited it to gain a more competitive advantage.  Instead of creating new and quality articles, some would resort to backdating to post “good” articles on a regular basis.

Most black hat spammers nowadays copy content online and set theirs to a date that’s earlier than the original post. This is aimed to lure Google with the hope that the latter would give more authority to their article.

For some who are really good at it, they succeeded. A lot failed though for not paying attention to details to their article content. A common example is incorrectly dating a post about the 2017 NBA Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors as a June 2016 article.

Google knows best

Google is no stranger to black hat schemes. Therefore, you’ll never expect any good results by simply backdating a stolen article.

Google, for the most part, doesn’t look at the posted date of web content. Instead, it looks into the index date of an article. The index date is often within the day when you posted the article.

Moreover, Google credits the originality of the article by keeping a record of the date of when it was first seen online. This means that the ranking of the original content doesn’t suffer at all if its index date is earlier than the copied version.

If in any case, spammers can confuse search engines, legitimate owners of the articles may still be protected. Thanks to site trust, those who have built their reputation are less likely to get penalized. On the other hand, sites that are known to steal content get reprimanded.

Conclusion

Although most viewers online are quite keen to the posted date, backdating is still not safe to use. It’s always best to come up with original articles that contain relevant and valuable information. Through time, you’ll see your hard work doing SEO the white-hat way pay off by seeing your site rank on top.