Hi leebow, and welcome to the forum. Here's a thread whose intention was to do the opposite of what you're wanting to do, but in the process of discussion, all likely dating mechanisms are discussed....

Removing date from articles - Ranking impact?
Nov 2015 - Mar 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4779415.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Having you explicitly included the update date on your article... as in: Updated Month dd, yyyy?

I'm a big fan of prominent, current dates on material that's affected by time. It makes researching much easier.

@leebow

Do you have a specific reason to show a more recent publication date? If it is time-sensitive (I echo Robert Charlton's point in that case) then the latest addition is important, but in establishing your copyright, the date of first publication is of far greater significance, and in most cases I would be more concerned if Google attributed a more recent date of publication to my own articles than an earlier one.

For copyright there is also an important distinction between adding to the articles and modifying them (do you amend the original article, or extend it?), but best practice in either case would be to show both original publication and most recent edition dates.

I am interested, however, in distinguishing the displayed date of publication from Google's internal record of the most recent change. What happens, for example, if you search using time-restriction (e.g. "last week") for an article Google has recently crawled?

Thanks for the replies :)

Basically - The site in question focuses on Christmas - and current deals, ideas, and the lead up to Christmas.

So my page for "DEALS THIS CHRISTMAS" for example - is still showing 1/12/2013 on Google.

Copyright doesn't bother me so much - but I do feel that visitors could be put off by the date - probably thinking the deals have all expired.

I have changed the page title - and the description on Google, and the title are correct - "DEALS THIS CHRISTMAS 2016" - and description "Find the best deals this Christmas 2016" for example, but then the actual date Google is suggesting the page was written still shows as 2013. So Google is actually caching newer versions of the page - but not the date it was added/found by the spiders.

Thanks again for the help - I will check the link now and see if I can get the problem fixed. I take it the date wont be updated by this Christmas the way that Google works? ;)

That is certainly time-sensitive!

Let us know how you get on.

How much of the article are you actually rewriting when you change the date? I'd say it's got to be more than a few sentences, though it's hard to say how much.

To a degree your inbound links are links to an existing page, and changing the page changes that linking relationship. I'd be reluctant to change the page too much... though others may disagree. In linking to the page, you're also linking to what the page links to... so even as you update the page there's a kind of continuity that needs to update also, while at the same time it remains at least a clear descendent of what originally attracted its inbound links. Possibly, some updating of the inbound links might help too... if you can accomplish that in a natural fashion.

I publish currency dependent pages. They are always indexed with new date in a couple days. I use the following technique:
• include date in document name (meta title tag)
• include date in page title (h1 tags)
• include date in above-fold page content
• update sitemap.xml