Posts Dates - Show or Hide? What do you do?

Scorpion Ghost · Dec 15, 2013

Ok guys, i know that this is not exactly SEO, but it can affect the clicks from search results and then it can affect whether a user will stay on your site to read your post or click the back button as soon as he/she sees the Post's Date.

My understanding is that there are 2 schools of thought on this:

1) Leave the Posts Dates

2) Hide the Posts Dates

I understand more or less both sides and the reasoning behind both sides.

For me, I believe that Posts Dates should be shown, because it's more considerate towards your readers and if you regularly update your posts then you can always keep the Dates recent, either by changing the date or inserting an Update, for example, "POST UPDATED 15/12/2013"...

However, however.. On the other hand, i believe that on little blogs that you just use to get traffic on your main site and backlinks, on those maybe you can remove the dates and not have to worry about updating it as much.

What do you think?

bartosimpsonio · Dec 15, 2013

Post dates are a great tool in getting your site indexed more often. When you leave them there you're basically telling readers how fresh the content is. Also if you're looking for technical info, it's good to know whether you're reading someting from the 1800's or whether it's fresh stuff....

So search engines use these hints to determine crawl rate of the site....a site with many new posts per day will be crawled more often.

Scorpion Ghost · Dec 15, 2013

bartosimpsonio said:
Post dates are a great tool in getting your site indexed more often. When you leave them there you're basically telling readers how fresh the content is. Also if you're looking for technical info, it's good to know whether you're reading someting from the 1800's or whether it's fresh stuff....

So search engines use these hints to determine crawl rate of the site....a site with many new posts per day will be crawled more often.

Alright, good stuff.

So will it affect crawling negatively if you remove dates, but still post "many new posts per day", as you said.?

citizenx28 · Dec 15, 2013

if you are adding many posts per day then I would tell you either to hide the date stamp or to schedule it.
But its not recommended to show the public that you are adding 30 posts per day.
And again, Search engine crawlers will know it whether you are adding 30 articles in a day or 1 article per day.

bartosimpsonio · Dec 15, 2013

Scorpion Ghost said:
Alright, good stuff.

So will it affect crawling negatively if you remove dates, but still post "many new posts per day", as you said.?

I wouldn't say that leaving the date out will affect it negatively, but it's one less hint for the frequency of your posts. Say you got a news site....a news site without a date is useless crap and looks fishy.

But say you gotta blog about fishing tackle....leaving the date out is not too bad in that case.

Scorpion Ghost · Dec 15, 2013

bartosimpsonio said:
I wouldn't say that leaving the date out will affect it negatively, but it's one less hint for the frequency of your posts. Say you got a news site....a news site without a date is useless crap and looks fishy.

But say you gotta blog about fishing tackle....leaving the date out is not too bad in that case.

Yeah that's true.. Say you got an Ancient History site. I think it's highly unlikely readers will be waiting for news on that.. you know, being Ancient and all

There you go, Evergreen niche --> Ancient History

blacktrilby · Dec 15, 2013

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-random-post-dater/ is a neat little tool.

Scorpion Ghost · Dec 15, 2013

blacktrilby said:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-random-post-dater/ is a neat little tool.

Looks good. Best solution is to update the date and always keep it up to date. Now, if you can schedule that en-mass, that's it... No problems and no wasting any time.

By the way, blacktrilby, how can i get to your Location??

wned2:

Oh, one more question which isn't directly related, but can be related to our topic here.

You know how Blogger includes the /m/y/ in every post's URL, and you cannot remove it or change it without messing up your URL and losing link juice or page rank or something.

Well, if you set a 301 redirect and re-post your post again (in order to get a new URL), do you lose any rankings, link-juice, or whetever else can be affected by doing that?

Sami Flip · Dec 17, 2013

well it doesn't matter weather you hide or not. it will not affect your site in any means.

onemth · Dec 17, 2013

It depends on what kind of site am I doing. If it is more of a blog site, I will show date. If it is more of like a company site, I will not show the date.

Scorpion Ghost · Dec 17, 2013

Sami Flip said:
well it doesn't matter weather you hide or not. it will not affect your site in any means.

I disagree..

It will affect your users as far as outdated content goes. In other words, what would you rather read:

1. Best SEO - 06/11/2013
2. Best SEO - 06/11/2008

???

The first one, of course.

And that's for when people land on your site. But when we're talking search engine traffic, in order for people to land on your site, it's also an issue, an SEO issue.

Becasue google displays the post date in the serps, it's much more likely that a user will click on a recent post than a years old post. So if you hide the date and the search engines don't display it, you will get more clicks. However, if you do show the date but keep it updated, that's the best thing to do as far as clicks and also as far as ranking goes, i believe.

_Chip_ · Dec 17, 2013

<?php $daysold = (current_time(timestamp) ? get_the_time('U') ? (get_settings('gmt_offset')))/(24*60*60); if ($daysold post_date)); } ?>

I found this somewhere on wpmu.. this keeps the date stamp for the 1st 30 days and then removes it. So, initially it will look like your content is fresh., but after 30 days it won't look like your content is not fresh..

ContentWriter · Dec 18, 2013

This is just my humble opinion but I prefer keeping the date (and time) stamp in every post whether it's for my business website or the Google News-approved websites of my clients.

Well, there are a few exemptions, such as what Scorpion Ghost mentioned.
But still, I'd choose to keep the date stamp.
Let's say Site X and Y are US History sites. Even if both sites have an article that answers my question "Who's the first US president?", I'd still choose to use the article that has the most recent date because that gives me an impression that it has the "latest" and "probably the most accurate" information in it.

Just my two cents, anyway.

MillionDollarBucks · Dec 22, 2013

Hi,
If you regularly post article then you may proudly include the date and google would pleased on your articles.But If long delay or irregular interval of posting it would be wise to hide post date.
All this i have been experienced in my site.

PrinceVisi · Dec 22, 2013

I personally leave them as they are.

When I open e new website I try to inflate the dates a little bit, but not when the website is up and running.

Posts Dates - Show or Hide? What do you do?

Scorpion Ghost

Elite Member

bartosimpsonio

Elite Member

Scorpion Ghost

Elite Member

citizenx28

Power Member

bartosimpsonio

Elite Member

Scorpion Ghost

Elite Member

blacktrilby

Supreme Member

Scorpion Ghost

Elite Member

Sami Flip

Newbie

onemth

Registered Member

Scorpion Ghost

Elite Member

_Chip_

Senior Member

ContentWriter

Banned - Selling via PM

MillionDollarBucks

Junior Member

PrinceVisi

Elite Member

Main Menu

Marketplace

Making Money

BlackHat World