Dates in the blog posts - on, off or regularly updated
-
Hello Moz community,
We have a blog where we post what we believe is very valuable, unique content for our niche. The content frequently stays very relevant for our visitor for many many years.
In terms of both user engagement and SEO, should we keep the dates in our blog posts?
Should we remove them?
Should we go through every blog post and edit it slightly every week even if there is no meaningful information we can add?
Should employ some kind of plugin that does update the blog post date automatically?
-
Completely agree with Rob! Doesn't matter in any way usually if you keep or remove it. Even as a publisher ourselves we tested it and what we mostly noticed is that almost nobody cares ;).
-
Hi Max,
This one is fairly straightforward - I wouldn't worry too much about the dates on the articles/posts as compared to what quality they present to your readers. RankBrain is looking at more than age when it is ranking your content (although age plays a role). More important than age, however, is the user interaction with the content.
If your content is unique and holds value for years, then dates shouldn't be an issue. If you are simply updating posts for the sake of updating posts, I doubt it will help very much when there are definitely more productive things you can be doing such as generating links or working on user experience or CRO (if your industry is open to such strategies).
Again, for user engagement, I wouldn't sweat it. Most users will click through on the first few results in SERPs regardless of when the article was written. The rest will likely come to your article if they do not find answers in more recent articles or posts. The only way changing the posts to alter their date makes sense to me is if someone submits an updated version of your content following a change in your industry.
Hope this advice helps!
All the best,
Rob
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page is it issue with base url?
Hi All, Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page. Is it issue or base url or relative url? Can you pls guide me? Looking to both tiny url you will get my point what i am saying. Please help Thanks!
Technical SEO | | amu1230 -
Can google bots read my internal post links if they are all listed in a javascript accordian where I list my sources?
I post a JavaScript accordion drop down tab [ a collapsible content area ] at the end of all my posts. I labeled the accordion "Show Article Sources"., and when a user clicks it, then the accordion expands open and it shows all the sources I listed for my article. And this is where I post all of my articles links that I reference per each article. But I read somewhere that google crawlers can not read text in a drop down JavaScript tab. So I am wondering now if this is true because that would mean I have no internal linking SEO going on since it cant read the links? ..... if it is true, then I should remove the accordion from all my articles and some how include the links I reference in the actual body text so I can get SEO benefits from external linking similar content? If that's true, what is an aesthetic way to do this, any example links? Tips ? Thoughts ?
Technical SEO | | ianizaguirre0 -
Is blog.example.com ok for seo benefits?
our blog is currently setup as blog.example.com is this OK for seo benefits for the main domain example.com? is there any benefit specifically for the domain level by having the blog set-up as example.com/blog? would it be worth the effort to do this on a large blog? thanks
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after
Hi all, Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net. We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book: Individual 301 redirects for all the pages. Change of address via the GWT. Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy. 4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000 The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects). And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain! Something is not right here, but I have no explanation why these pages still exist. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | skifr0 -
How to avoid duplicate content when blogging from a site
I have a wordpress plastic surgery website. I have a wordpress blog on the site. My concern is avoiding duplicate content penalties when I blog. I use my blog to add new information about procedures that have pages on the same topic on the main site. Invariably same keywords and phrases can appear in the blog-will this be considered Duplicate content? Also is it black hat to insert anchor text in a blog linking back to site content-ie internal link or is one now and then helpful
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
SEO credit for subdomain blogs?
One of my clients is currently running a webstore through Volusions. They would like to add a blog to their website, but since Volusions doesn't currently support blogs on the same domain we would have to create a Wordpress blog and link it to a subdomain. (http://support.volusion.com/article/linking-your-blog-your-volusion-store) Using this method, will their primary website receive any SEO credit for the content being created on the blog or will it only count towards the subdomain? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CMSSolutions980 -
Why I am a seeing an error for duplicate content for any categories and tags on my Wordpress blog?
When I look under "Crawl Diagnostics" I see I have 12 errors for duplicate content and there are all from tags and categories. I am assuming that search engines are reading the content in the tags and categories as duplicate. Should I set my categories to "no-index?"
Technical SEO | | brytewire0 -
Tutorial For Moving Blogger Blog From Sub-Domain to Sub-Directory
Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial for moving a blogger.com (blogspot) blog that's currently hosted on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) to a subdirectory (i.e. mysite.com/blog) with the current version of blogger? I'm working on transferring my blogger blogs over to wordpress, and to do so without losing link juice or traffic, this is one of the steps I have to take. There's plenty of tutorials that address moving from blogspot.mysite.com to wordpress and I've even found a few that address moving from blog.mysite.com (hosted on blogger) to a root domain mysite.com. However, I need to move from blog.mysite.com (blogger) to mysite.com/blog/ - subdirectory (wordpress). Anyone who knows how to do this or can point me in the right direction?? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0