Tweets: Google Just Explained Why Fake Content Refreshes Don't Work Anymore

1. Google's Gary Illyes said this month: if your lastmod dates are wrong, remove them entirely. "At least you save a few bytes." A blunt way of saying Google no longer takes freshness signals at face value. [LINK]

2. John Mueller explained why pages get crawled but never indexed: thin, generic content. His line stuck with us: "Anyone could have written this. This tells me nothing." That's the bar now. [LINK]

3. Two Google statements, one week apart, same lesson: a publish date is a promise. Lastmod fails when the promise doesn't match reality. So does a "refresh" that only changes the date. [LINK]

4. If your CMS bumps the modified date on every save, including typo fixes, that's the exact pattern Google said it stops trusting. Only touch lastmod when something a reader would notice actually changed. [LINK]

5. Quick audit: pull your last 5 "refreshed" posts. For each one, can you say in one sentence what changed besides the date? If not, you've found the problem. [LINK]

6. Google isn't penalizing AI-generated content for being AI-generated. It's penalizing pages so generic that anyone could have written them. That's a much higher bar than swapping a date. [LINK]

7. Trust breaks fast and rebuilds slow, for lastmod dates and for content refreshes. One good update won't undo a pattern of cosmetic ones. Here's what a real refresh actually looks like: [LINK]