Change dates of WordPress posts in bulk using a CSV file

Hey Guys,

I wanted to post this in WP-Advanced forum, but it doesn’t work and says only moderators can post there…

I’m doing a SEO experiment with one my blogs and I need your help!

Everyone heard of the Panda Update released by Google in February. This update changed many things for many publishers as they saw their traffic go down, dramatically in some cases.

One of the aspects mentioned by Google when they released Panda is that they were now, more than ever, considering the overall content quality of a site to determine how high a page or a site would rank. The problem is that we, like many others, published content for years on our blogs that were appreciated by the readers AND the search engine. Now we’re stuck with thousand of blog posts that are no longer very useful to the readers because they’re old and even more important are penalizing us in the search engine because the rules were changed over night.

The first reaction we had was to delete content from a specific period and delete content from specific authors that were not doing top quality content all the time. But after checking the performance of old content in Google Analytics, we realized that sometimes old posts from a bad author were still ranking high in the search engine and receiving a lot of traffic…So, if we eliminate that content, we might even rank lower and will lose traffic…hummm.

We then did a traffic per post report in Analytics from the last 5 months and sorted it by the number of pageviews. This report was then exported to Excel. This gave us a list of posts that were not receiving a lot of visitors from the search engine. This list is probably a good part of the content that is not well recognized by Google. I know we can’t say that this has a straight cause-effect relationship, but we’re certainly close to it.

Now, with the list of post urls in a CSV file, how do we take that away from the search engine? Yes, it could be simply deleted. But the solution we found was to change the year that those posts were published. Permalinks are constructed with the /year/month/slug. If we change the year of those post to something like /2001/, we could exclud the directory /2001/ in the robot.txt file and all the posts would disappear from the Google Index.

This is were I need help! How do I do change these dates! I’m not an SQL pro but I can run queries PHPadmin but I can’t build them. This needs to be done in bulk because will have 1000-1500 posts to change.

Thanks for your help!