[WA]

What? I thought I read somewhere on Google's webdev infos that they know when an article was first created vs. updated. Not sure if this "old trick" still improves the ranking of an article, but surely enough, it baits people into clicking on a link.

I noticed it a couple times myself. Stuff that's obviously an older article appears in the SERPs as if it was published a few days ago.

[sct202]

It could be a self fulfilling thing, if the CTR increases on a search listing (because it appears newer to the user) that listing generally moves up because of higher CTR.