When to Change Dates in Page Titles

Using the current year in your page title is a great way to show searchers that the content is fresh and relevant.

It can also be a way to grab attention and stand out against other search results.

But when a new year rolls around, the necessary update might not be as simple as you think…

We had a great discussion about this topic this week in the course community when Carolina posted a reminder to make sure your dates are changed. David brought up an interesting case from his site, and it made me realize that the nuance would make a great blog post!

In this post, I’ll introduce some nuance, as well as tips for keeping your titles (and content) up to date!

Should you use dates in page titles?

When I’m searching on Google, I often specifically seek out pages that show that they have been updated somewhat recently.

This isn’t important for every type of content.

Some things are evergreen and really won’t matter when you posted.

If you’re writing about “how to include dogs in your engagement photos” for example, the year is going to have very little relevance. The people searching for this topic likely want inspiration, and there aren’t likely to be new trends within the last 12-24 months.

On the other hand, if you’re writing about “the best wedding venues in Columbia, SC” the age of the post is much more relevant. Venues open and close all the time, and a list that is fresh is likely to contain venues that are popular now (not 10 years ago).

The key is to understand whether searchers care about recent information.

I personally think that using the year is a great way to increase CTR (Click Through Rate), and I almost always experiment with a version of the page title that includes a date if it is even remotely relevant.

Here are some other thoughts on freshness and recency…

QDF – Query Deserves Freshness

It is well known that Google does have a bias toward recency for certain types of queries.

There isn’t a way to know *exactly* which queries might have this filter applied, but it is useful to know that it exists.

Google gives some vague examples here:

I included this section just in case you want to dig into QDF further. Doing a Google search for “Query Deserves Freshness” will give you plenty of places to start.

For the real SEO nerds, here’s a Google patent you might find fascinating.

AI search – biased toward recency?

In some cases, AI search tools may have a bias toward recency. Often, an LLM will have a training cutoff date, and if you are asking about information where it needs to perform a web search, it may explicitly search for new information.

I don’t have much data on this, but I encourage you to pay attention to how content freshness might impact AI recommendations.

Titles vs. other date signals

The page title isn’t the only piece of information Google and AI tools are using to determine whether content is fresh.

One important piece of information is the date the page was published. Website platforms often add special Schema to indicate the official published date.

There is also schema for the modified date. Some WordPress themes do a good job of adding an updated date that includes proper markup.

Google will also keep their own internal notes about the date a page was first discovered, indexed, and when they noticed updates to the page.

Finally, the content itself needs to be consistent with what Google or AI expects from recent content. Even if all of the date signals say the content is fresh, if it looks similar to older content that they know about, the date signals may be discounted.

Should you change the published date on posts?

Personally, I almost never update published dates on my articles unless I’m starting completely fresh with the content but want to keep the old URLs.

I prefer using an updated date.

In fact, I’m experimenting with my own custom modification that shows the updated date along with a simple changelog so that visitors know *exactly* what changed.

That way they don’t need to wonder if I’m just manipulating them by changing the date.

One thing I learned as I researched for this article is that Google suggests only showing ONE date, either the published date or the updated date. I’m going to modify my feature to implement this suggestion.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/publication-dates

On some website platforms, it isn’t possible to display modified dates or implement something custom like this. In those cases, it may be worth experimenting with changing the published date when you make major changes to your content.

Here’s an older case study that makes a case for simply updating dates.

I found other case studies that gave conflicting information. I’m not linking to them here because none of the ones I could find felt perfectly relevant.

What you should know is that you should absolutely track your results if you decide to experiment with updating post dates.

In my opinion, this is much riskier than updating the date in a page title.

I’ll talk more about this below in the “Will these changes impact your rankings” section.

When should you update the year?

One thing that is an instant red flag is when a page title clearly has very outdated information.

I actually found an example on the Fuel Your Photos blog that needs urgent updating!

However, if I simply went in and changed that title to say “January 2026” without updating the article, it would be misleading (perhaps even manipulative).

Here’s the rule of thumb for updating dates in page titles…

You should update dates when one of two things is true:

1. You’ve actually made significant changes to the content that reflect updated information for the current/upcoming year.
2. You’ve reviewed the content carefully and know that it is still fully relevant for the current or upcoming year.

Using Search Console

One thing you can do is check Search Console to see if people are searching *specifically* using a date. This shows very strong intent for fresh content.

Just add a query filter for the year like this…

In some cases, you’ll find that people are searching for the next year very early!

I just looked on a high school senior photographer’s blog and noticed that there was a spike in queries about senior pictures in 2026 starting in October of 2025.

You may find your own unique patterns by searching for the previous, current, and upcoming year… so go give it a try!

Making other updates

I hope that this is the core message that comes across in this article.

You should be updating your dates on content when you are actually making changes to the content.

The exact time that you change the year will depend heavily on what those updates look like.

For example, if you are updating an article to include the newest trends for senior pictures in 2026, I think it is fine to change the date in the title mid-year.

For most people, content that includes a date in the title should likely be updated near the end of the year or early in the new year. December and January are often a great time for photographers to be making these changes since it is often a slower season.

Will these changes impact your rankings?

This is where the nuance comes into play.

In my opinion, adding a date in a page title is *primarily* for CTR optimization.

Better CTR may impact your ranking over time (controversial, but I’m convinced CTR is a ranking factor after the 2024 Google leak).

In my personal experience, articles with previous years in the title start to see a decline pretty quickly in the new year. I almost always try to do a check in late December or early January to make sure the dates are consistent with the content I want to present.

That being said…

Updating the dates in the title or changing the published date without actually making any modifications to the content may actually harm your rankings.

Not only is this supported by almost everything I’m finding online (including all conventional advice given by Google), but this is what sparked the conversation in our Discord community this week!

David posted some screenshots from last December when he decided to change dates in his page titles across several articles all at once.

While I’m not 100% convinced that this dip was specifically because of the date change, it was enough of a warning for me to think this post is worth writing with nuance.

David told me that his plan for this year is to wait a little longer, and gradually change dates to 2026 instead of changing everything at once. I think this is a great approach.

My added advice is to make sure that the change is accompanied by an actual content update.

Tips for finding posts that need an update

Now that we’ve covered the theory and nuance, I want to leave you with some practical tips for finding the content that needs updating.

Use a site: search

This is my favorite trick!

Go to Google and do a search for:

site:yourdomain.com intitle:2025

(obviously search for the current relevant year)

This should return a list of indexed page that have the year in the title!

Keep a changelog / spreadsheet

I always recommend that students keep a spreadsheet with a changelog for their top content.

If you have a large amount of time sensitive content or articles with dates in the titles, I would keep these in a separate spreadsheet where it is an easy checklist item to update every year!

Do a site crawl

You can always use a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl your site and list all URLs, titles, descriptions, and other important information. This is a bit more advanced, but worth mentioning for those who want to be thorough.

Check your HTML sitemap

If you are using an HTML sitemap, it can be an easy way to glance at all of your page titles in a list to see if any of them include dates that might need updating.

Continue the conversation…

I’ll certainly be paying more attention to this topic in the future now that I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of case studies with varying results.

If you make changes to dates in your page titles, or update the published date I’d love to hear about your results!

Feel free to share other tips, tricks, or tools that you’ve used to make this process easier.

Leave a comment here, or if you’re a member come join the conversation in Discord!