How to find an outdated year in meta tags and content: instructions

Using a licensed ScreamingFrog can quickly find an outdated year in meta tags and other elements of the site in order to change it. You you can also use ScreamingFrog without a license, but there is a limit of 500 addresses. The search will take from 1 to several tens of minutes, depending on the size of the site. Below is a step-by-step guide to identifying an outdated year in meta tags/subtitles.

Please note that some dates should not be updated, for example, if you have an informational article about the events of the past year. The year should be changed to the current one in cases where there is "evergreen" SEO content that is collected for conversion and monetization.

Instruction: how to find outdated year in meta tags and h1-h2

Time to complete 3 minutes

Tools:

✅ Screaming Frog with active license

✅ Google Sheets (optional)

Step one: navigate to the desired crawler section

Open ScreamingFrog, paste the site address (with protocol) into the line above as usual, and then click on the settings sliders in the "Search" box.

Step Two: Customize the crawler

In the section that opens, configure the crawler: in the first column select "Title", in the second column "Contains", in the third column enter "2022" or any other year you want to update. This rule will find addresses with "2022" in the title. After the first rule, add via the "OR" button the same conditions for descripcion, h1/h2. After completing all the settings, click "OK".

Step three: start the crawler

Make sure the rules are saved and start the crawler. As a result of processing, ScreamingFrog will show you only pages that match the search rules.

After the crawler is finished, you can download the result in csv format, import it into Google Sheets and work there. Then it will be necessary to determine by eye where you need to update the year, and where not.

The downside of this method is that the crawler does not detect an outdated year in paragraphs, lists, tables, etc. - if we talk about content, ScreamingFrog will show an outdated year only in subheadings. The fact is that parsing all the words in the content would take too much time.

I also recommend automating year changes where appropriate using variable functions. This will greatly simplify the work in the future.