Republish / Change Publish Date Of An Article - Any SEO Help/Harm?

Question

My sites has some old tutorials, which I am planning to update according to the latest version and change the publish date so that visitors can see it as a fresh tutorial.

I am just concerned whether it will do any harm to the tutorial SEO or otherwise have any benefit or not. Any suggestions/feedback is appreciated.

Answer 1

Since Google really likes fresh content, I don't think it will be a disadvantage to update your content:

• Google will crawl it and display a more fresh date next to your result in its search page
• People coming to your tutorial from Google won't come back on Google because your tutorial is up to date

One thing you shouldn't do is update the url according to the tutorial update. You will lose the history of the page and potentially the previous weight of the page.

So, go ahead and keep your tutorial up to date !

Answer 2

The only reason that I can think that this could harm you is in the case of scraped content. Google tries to find out which site had the content first and show only that site. If your site says you published it later, you might no longer be considered the original site.