Update node alias while retaining the old alias
Ultimately, a VBO action affecting a node is going to call node_save() which will change the changed node property that determines when the updated marker appears. 

To get around this, you'll need to preserve the node changed timestamps following your bulk alias updating. You can do this by directly updating the node.changed column in the database. 

Depending on your preferences, there's many ways to backup/restore database data. For example, executing a Drush snippet before node alias bulk updating could dump a JSON file with your nid/updated timestamps:

drush ev '$nodes = db_select("node", "n")
  -&gt;fields("n", array("nid", "changed"))-&gt;execute();
$timestamps = array();
foreach ($nodes as $node) {
  $timestamps[$node-&gt;nid] = $node-&gt;changed;
}
echo json_encode($timestamps);' &gt; my_node_timestamps.json


Following bulk alias updating, another snippet could restore it from the JSON: 

cat my_node_timestamps.json | drush ev '
$timestamps = json_decode(file_get_contents("php://stdin"));
foreach ($timestamps as $nid =&gt; $timestamp) {
  db_update("node")
    -&gt;fields(array("changed" =&gt; $timestamp))-&gt;condition("nid", $nid)-&gt;execute();
}
'


As the case with any operations directly touching your database directly, make sure to perform backups before performing any such bulk operation.