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I was thinking about this too. Search engines should regularly crawl a page and notice that the content has been updated right? So it seems like they should ignore pubdate as it could be gamed, and just measure the real "last updated" date based on content changes.

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> So it seems like they should ignore pubdate as it could be gamed, and just measure the real "last updated" date based on content changes.

It's hard to imagine a mechanistic measure of the 'real' last-updated date that couldn't also be gamed. (If I'm being really cynical, it's hard to imagine anything that couldn't be gamed; so I guess I mean 'easily gamed', for some value of 'easily'.)

I’ve got my update cron job waiting in the wings.

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