See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32909343

Knew it sounded familiar. But why would they republish it? The old post now 404s.

Yes, that is not cool. By coincidence, a few days ago, I followed a link to an SO blog article, but the link was broken, I searched the article title on Google, which led me... to the same 404 page again. So I took to the great Internet Archive which fortunately worked. Only later have I found that because the article in question was so good they chose to republish it, all original links broke in the process.

thats cause the date is part of the URL. so changing the date changed the URL, and so thereby violated nr 2 of the Cool URL rules:

URL-Rule 1: unique (1 URL == 1 resource, 1 resource == 1 URL)

URL-Rule 2: permanent (they do not change, no dependencies to anything)

URL-Rule 3: manageable (equals measurable, 1 logic per site section, no complicated exceptions, no exceptions)

URL-Rule 4: easily scalable logic

URL-Rule 5: short

URL-Rule 6: with a variation (partial) of the targeted phrase

URL-Rule 1 is more important than 1 to 6 combined, URL-Rule 2 is more important than 2 to 6 combines, … URL-Rule 5 and 6 are a trade-of. 6 is the least important.

To game search engine dupe detection maybe?

To get the same benefit of posting article without writing new one.

And it worked, it reached front page again. I wonder how often then recycle articles and post them with fake dates.

I thought exactly the same and was confused by the date. Thanks for the confirmation.

SO blog editor here (and author of the piece). Sorry for the confusion, we're republishing our top ten posts of the year over the holidays, and I guess y'all picked this one up again.

So what does the date mean? Date last marketed?

Not a great thing to do IMO... by all means resurface the good stuff to the top of the blog, but why change the date? SEO? I don't think there's a good answer?

Are you planning on fixing the misleading date?

I understand if they need to update the date to get it to show up at the top of the blog. But, in that case they can just add a few words to the front of the article saying that they are republishing an item from September.

Since the date is in the URL, you broke old links, and without a redirect at that. You should look into how you "republish" because it doesn't look like you're doing it ideally.

Just some helpful advice. Without a redirect, SEO on the old post will go poof.

Gives new ad impressions with a new date.