How To Add ‘Last Updated’ To Genesis WordPress Themes

Why add ‘Last Updated’ to Genesis WordPress Themes?

I was reading an article over at Viper Chill about how new ‘fresh’ content appears to be ranking above highly regarded older content in Google these days. From the tests that Glen at Viper Chill ran over the course of a year (with 100 or more search terms) he found that fresh content would outrank old stuff in most cases. Even if the fresh content was spammy and the old stuff was good quality.

As you can imagine this caused a real stir.

On this blog I deliberately removed the post date because I knew people often ignore older information in preferences to the latest stuff. I thought that if I removed the date then people wouldn’t be influenced by this factor and would read my content based on it’s quality. However, after reading the above article I came away thinking that dates on blog posts are important after all as they take advantage of the freshness element of the Google algorithm.

Making your content appear fresh to Google

I decided that using the post date on my WordPress blog was a bad idea. This dates the post badly and would lead to poor Google rankings. However, I do update my posts quite often – even the older ones – so I decided that I should use ‘last updated’ as my post date instead. That way the information looks fresh to Google and to my readers.

Adding ‘Last Updated to ‘Genesis’ – surely it’s easy

I uses the Genesis Theme on my blog so I had to figure out how to add the post update date instead of the post date. I thought that swapping out the code for August 1, 2013 for something like [latest_update] would do the trick. My first port of call was the shortcode reference  on the Genesis website but when I checked it out I realized there was no shortcode that I could use.

So I had to come up with a plan that allowed the date to appear without hacking the core code in Genesis. With a little help from The Customize Window and Genesis plugins Genesis Simple Edits and Genesis Simple Hooks I was able to get the effect I was after.

How To Add ‘Last Updated’ To Genesis WordPress Themes

1. Login to the admin area of your WordPress website
2. Select Plugins > Add New from the menu
3. In the search box type in ‘Genesis Simple Edits‘ and click search plugins
4. Click ‘Install Now’ below the item ‘Genesis Simple Edits‘
5. Click OK to say you are happy to install the plugin
6. Let the plugin install and on the next screen that appears click ‘Activate Plugin’
7. Repeat steps 2 -6 for the ‘Genesis Simple Hooks‘ plugin
8. Select Genesis > Simple Edits from the menu
9. In the top box called ‘Post Info’ remove all of the text and click ‘Save Settings’
10. Select Genesis > Simple Hooks from the menu
11. Scroll about half way down the list of hooks to ‘genesis_after_post_title Hook’
12. In the box copy and paste this code (see the end of this post for an explanation of the code):

    <?php $u_time = get_the_time('U');
    $u_modified_time = get_the_modified_time('U');
    if($u_modified_time != $u_time) {
    echo "<p style = 'font-size: 80%'>Last updated : ";
    the_modified_time('j F Y');
    echo "</p>";
    } ?>

13. Underneath put a tick in the box that says ‘Execute PHP on this hook?’
14. Click  any Save Changes button on the page

What the code means
The code that you used finds the modified date and time and then displays it under the post title at 80% of it’s original size.

I don’t actually show the update time, just the date  – but you could add this if you wish. Simply update the line that says:

the_modified_time('j F Y');

to:

the_modified_time('l, j F Y g:i A');

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