(I have written an update to this post, please read this first)
No, not that kind of date; though if Brian Clark or Sonia Simone ever come over to London, I’d love to take them out for lunch (that’s an open invitation guys!)
Regular readers will know that copyblogger is my favourite blog and a constant source of inspiration, however, the reason I want a date from Brian and Sonia, is that none of the posts on copyblogger have a date associated with them. The dates are missing both from the URL slugs and from the posts themselves.
Whilst there are SEO reasons for doing this, (I remove dates from the URLs on this blog) there’s a user experience reason NOT to remove all mention of them, which I want to share with you.
It’s simply this: By not knowing the date of a post, you don’t know if you are reading something that’s still relevant.
Here’s why dates matter in blog posts
Most of the content on copyblogger is evergreen. This means their posts are almost timeless and likely to be of just as much value, years after they were originally published. However, some posts contain suggestions and ideas, which are time sensitive. There are posts, for example, which give emphasis to services like digg.com, which were far more relevant a year or 2 ago than they are today. Other posts from 4 or 5 years ago regarding social media, will completely omit services like Twitter, which were of no real relevance at the time. (You can connect with me on Twitter here)
In short, those are posts with time sensitive information, which come with no “use by” date.
An alternative approach to removing all date information
If you are looking at emulating Brian’s approach to removing the date from your blog post URL’s, I recommend you consider including the date of each post in the post meta; see below. This is what I do here and it works extremely well. It means you retain the SEO benefits, yet still provide readers with a way to see how old the information they are reading is.
Of course, I don’t think for one minute that Brian or Sonia will change the format of their blog posts, but I did want to share the idea with you. Lots of new bloggers emulate what they see the big guys doing, and that makes a lot of sense. However, sometimes there are things you can do when you have hundreds of thousands of readers, which work less well when you are still in the building stages. I believe the date omission is one such example.
What do you think?
PS: Remember to check out copyblogger for stacks of great content!
Photo: DafneCholet
I agree with you, no date in URL unless it is a date specific post. For example: http://www.ilovetrancemusic.com/new-trance-tracks-12-october-2009/
Hey Stuart. You can do as I say in the post, and add the date to the post’s meta so it’s visible.
For new releases on sites like your trance blog, clearly dates are extremely important.
Jim it always amuses me that people remove dates thinking that nobody will scroll down to the comments and see what date the post was published.
I remove the dates from the URL becoz as you mention it’s ugly and not good for SEO.
But I keep them on my posts because it annoys me to no end when I arrive on a post and have no idea when it was written.
Your point abt some content being evergreen is spot on, marketing talk and general thoughts don’t have an expiry date on them. This is why your posts are evergreen Jim, you give us the big picture and this will never go out of date.
Yes not something for digital babies
Hi there John. Thanks for the kind words.
Like you, I know to go and scroll down to the comments to get an idea of the posts age, but noobs don’t.
More importantly, when someone RT’s or shares an old copyblogger post on Facebook etc, most people will assume it’s new/recent; when it could be years old.
You can make costly mistakes operating with out of date info
I have always had the date on my blog post urls. As it is a legal information blog I think it is important that people know when it was written, as law changes over time – either new legislation or new case law.
So the date is an important part of the post.
[...] document.getElementById("fb-root").appendChild(e); }()); More and more bloggers are removing the dates from their blog posts. This post explains some of the reasons why they are doing it and whether or not you should do [...]