Should you date your blog posts?

 

Getting people to read your blog posts can be difficult. There are so many elements at play, and algorithms are changed and updated quickly, meaning that a post that did well last month might fail to get readers the next.

Something I’m currently testing is removing the dates from my past posts. There are mixed opinions on this – some people are adamant that we should be dating our posts all the time, while others argue that it can be damaging to have it there.

So I’ve done a bit of research, and I’d like to share some of what I found, and my own opinions on why I’ve decided to try removing the dates from my own blog posts for a while.

Pros and cons of dating blog posts

According to Problogger, blog posts can be either evergreen or time sensitive. When people search Google, they can make judgements on whether the articles they see are relevant to them based on their age. If an article is dated several months or years ago, then it could potentially be off-putting because it can be perceived as ‘old news’.

Due to the fast pace of the internet, there is always going to be information more recent, and therefore perhaps more current to your readers. When faced with 2 articles on the same subject, people might opt for the newest one, believing it to be most up to date, and therefore most accurate.

On the other hand, having a date can be really useful, because it gives your readers and indication of when the post was written, so that they can make decisions based on how recent it is. It also can be a handy record of events and trends.

The trick to knowing whether or not to date your posts might be as simple as looking at the type of content you tend to produce. If your subjects are mainly evergreen (i.e. the content is relevant to readers right now, but equally will be useful in a year or more), or are written with a bias to things that are going on in your industry right now, and might be out of date next month or next year.

3 myths about dates on blog posts

People expect to see dates on blog posts

Back when blogging was in its infancy (yes, I’m old enough to remember those days!), we had no choice but to date our blog posts. Blogs were created as a kind of journal (“Blog” is short for “web-log”), and begun as a diary format which people used to update people on current news – and in some cases by younger users as an angsty teenage diary (true story).

But the way we use blogs now is very different. It has become more of a marketing tool, in which we can entertain, educate and build relationships with our clients. A huge chunk of the content we read online these days is by way of blog posts – check if you don’t believe me.

Old blog posts receive less views

Here’s something interesting – while I was researching for this blog post, I noticed that I was looking at the dates on some of the posts I read! It wasn’t a conscious decision, and in fact I did use some of the information from older blog posts as I was taking notes, because I believe that the information is still very relevant in what I wanted to say here. But it did get me thinking that those dates didn’t necessarily need to be there – if the content tis evergreen, then I don’t really need to know the date it was written.

So perhaps there is something behind the statistics that old posts get less views – I don’t have evidence either way. It’ll be interesting to see if my post stats change now that I’ve removed the dates.

Evidence of regular blog posts promotes brand trust

Here’s a myth I do believe in – if I’m reading a blog and I can see that:

- It hasn’t been updated in 6 months;

- Sometimes the blog is updated weekly, and sometimes there are gaps of 2 or 3 months.

That says to me that the brand doesn’t care about its online presence, and therefore isn’t serious enough about its marketing to want to woo me as a potential customer. I like to know what the company is doing and thinking right now – and cares enough to tell me about it.

The last word

Do I think that dating blog posts is important? Well, I predict that it will become less important, simply because of the way that we consume content now. Blog posts have become trustworthy pages in their own right, and the lines between blog posts and static content are becoming more blurred than they once were.

Whether you choose to use dates is entirely down to you. Feel free to experiment, and see what happens.