<b>Republishing old posts with a new date does not force a re-crawl</b>

<b>Republishing old posts with a new date does not force a re-crawl</b>

The trick gets passed around constantly: bump the date, maybe change a paragraph, and Google treats it as fresh and re-crawls. Mostly it doesn't, and Google has gotten good at spotting cosmetic freshness.

Crawl demand for a URL is driven by how often it actually changes and how popular it is. If Google has watched you flip the dateline ten times while the content sat still, it learns to discount your freshness signals and crawls you <i>less</i>, not more.

Real change earns re-crawl: substantially rewritten content, new internal links pointing at the page, external links, genuine updates users would notice. A timestamp is not a change.

Google isn't crawling your date field. It's crawling your content, and it remembers.