Showing Articles Updated Date instead of Published Date in WordPress

Few Weeks ago, in an Article I was explained you the method of Removing Date Timestamp from Google Search already. Now I come with another Interesting Article on Same Topic. Now we all know how to remove the  Date Time Stamp from SERPs but What If I want to Show a Last Modified Date instead of Showing Published Date on both My Website and its Indexed Pages on Google Search Engine.

This sounds little crazy, but I tested this and found some positive impact on my site performance not BlogTechnics tested on another Site. Then you would like to ask what that Positive Impact was? No worry I am going to share with you. As we all know Google Bot is much active these days and index site throughout the day, can’t say exactly the correct figure. But Sites with high Update Frequency it is very less. Some of the Site gets indexed their pages in just 15-20 just after publishing.  You could also notice that Google always keeps updating your Articles, Check your most commented Articles. If any of your Articles has some genuine comments with keywords, no doubt your site would be listed on Google with some of them.

I get known to this fact when I saw one of my articles on first page of Google with keyword ‘Aakash Tablet Camera’ I felt little shock coz my Article didn’t have any word like ‘Camera’ on Article. Without wasting my time I opened that Article and Pressed Ctrl+F and putted the word ‘Camera’ on search box and hit ENTER. I felt little astonished that was a comment, and a visitor asked their ‘How Can we Connect Camera to Aakash Tablet’ The Reason of sharing this story is google Always keep on updating your indexed pages if you’re ranking and article quality is good.

 Benefits of Showing Modified Date instead of Published Date.

• Increase Visitor’s Trust.
• Increase Click Through Rate on SERPs
• Keep Live your Old but Quality Articles

Exactly same like as Showing Author Photo beside Search Result, For This there is no any guarantee Google will always change the Timestamp in accordance with Date on your Article. Also Remember Google Doesn’t depends upon the date you show on your Articles; they follow the last date when they indexed your articles.

This method would be more helpful for those who believe in keep updated their good performing articles with the latest facts such as, me.

Go to your Single.php file and search for Date Stamp code and replace that with the code mentioned below. Your Date Stamp code would be like this one,

php the_time(‘F j, Y’) ?>

Replace code shown above with the new code shown just below.

Updated on: php the_time('F j, Y') ?>
php $u_time = get_the_time('U');
$u_modified_time = get_the_modified_time('U');
if ($u_modified_time != $u_time) {
echo "and last modified on ";
the_modified_time('F j, Y');
echo ". "; } ?>

 Then just save your file and done! now whenever a visitor will land on your articles, he [she] will see the article’s last updated date instead of article’s published date. In my earlier posts i have been already shared how can you show Published Date and Last Updated Date in WordPress both together, next to each other. You can also achieve this just by showing the code below instead of code mentioned above, but only if you are using WordPress 2.6+ version.

<?php the_modified_date(‘F j, Y’); ?>

Both will produce same result you can use anyone you like. In case you will not modify any post in future in that case the article creation date would be shown there. You can show article last modified date at everywhere archives, index and single pages. Just replace the code 1 with code 2 or code 3. For any help feel free to ask.