Recently I have annoying learned of one of the newest SEO tricks out there.
Not dating your blog posts.
Do you have any idea how annoying that is?
I do a fair amount of research using the Goog. Much of the time my search will lead me to a blog or 5, usually covered with ads and not showing the date of the post.
I need the date. I want to know if the information I’m finding is still relevant or still applies to a certain application that I’m researching. I don’t want to have to look at the comments for the date, I want to see it at the top or bottom of the post.
Using excerpts on archve pages? Ok, I can see that. Changing the layout to make sure the content is at the top when you look at the source? That makes total sense to me too. Even making sure the title is relevant to the site. All make perfect sense.
But not dating your posts? Can anyone tell me a good reason why you would want to do that? How does excluding the date increase your page rank? Increase traffic?
Like I have recently mentioned, I think a blog is useless unless you can easily get to the content. Part of that is having the ability to check if it’s relevant or not by looking at the post date.
Hiding it, to me, seems a lot like blocking your phone number when you call out. I’m sure there is a good reason, but I will never be able to wrap my head around it. If you can give me a good explanation for that too feel free, ’cause I’ve never understood it.
One Response to “SEO Tricks are Evil”
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July 8th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I think the thought is that older entries might get rank lower because of their overall age. So not dating them might “trick” Google as to the age of the post and not cause it to slip in age…
However you’d think that Google would have some idea as to when an item was first cataloged by one of their crawlers…