Should I remove post date from posts in my website?

I would only do it if it is EVERGREEN content.

Also, certain niches or post types imply some sort of VERSION PROGRESSION.

That would be hard to pull off if you take off the post dates.

I get where you're coming from though. But make sure you consider the concerns above before you decide.

yes. you will find study after study if you search the internet about higher engagment if you remove the dates. I know for a fact I do this myself. Doesn't matter if it is an evergreen topic. If I am searching for something and I see the blog post date is like 2009... I wont even click it.

Totally impartial case study found here gives pros and cons of both

Effect of Showing Dates on Search Engine Ranking [Case Study]

good luck

We just had a discussion about whether to show or remove post dates here

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...r-website.html

As for me all of my sites do not have dates in their URLs for fear of oitsated content and I think it ahould be that way. But if you look bog sites, some of them have dates and they eank well.

Just pull the year. leave the month and day.

Thank you for this post, I just realized my mobile theme was still showing the dates and thus had been indexed with the dates showing in google. With 5 year old content I think it might have put some people off from clicking through, but the content is as relevant today as it every was.

Yes absolutely, I would absolutely do that as people tend to dislike something that was written a while ago even though it's still effective..

Just the way we are I guess!

Don t remove data if you speak about a technical theme!

Yes, remove the post date from all your posts as well as pages. It's not about just a seasonal or evergreen niche. The obvious intention is to keep your website visitor from thinking that your content is old/obsolete and may or may not work for him.

The only niches in which you should NOT remove the post dates are following.
Examples: Medical/Health websites, Research websites, News websites, Official websites...
i.e. Cases in which the date is of utmost importance and the content credibility/validity is derived from it.

I hope you get the idea!

This is a very important topic that you started, i removed the date from my blog urls by adjusting the settings in Wordpress. I have not seen any difference in the ranking on Google so i assume it
does not matter. The date however makes your blog url look very messy and long.

From your description, I would remove the dates from the posts.

Also, make sure none of your media content is organized by date. This is an option in the Media section of Settings. If people do image searches and see that your great picture is a couple of years old most people will dismiss it immediately.

I never thought much about it until I read an article on the same subject
and it made a lot of sense. Readers value your information based on
the date, even when the date doesn't matter. I did the same for the
(c)publication date for one of my ebooks as well since the material
is evergreen. The irony here is that most of the "best sellers" are
book that recast old ideas into new metaphors. The Good Book
says there is nothing new under the sun.

-Ray Edwards

I never use dates. All a date does is tell someone how old the post is. That's not useful to me.

Charlie

Just write the posts. Removing the dates won't make you a millionaire.

Great content, alot of traffic, constant new subscribers, and a monetization system will create as much money for your business as you wish.

Plus you should test to see which one makes YOU more money (not somebody else on the forum). Test between:

A) Posts with no dates

B) Posts with dates

According to the article linked-to about about the case study, Google dislikes serving up pages dated from years ago. As a human though, I really appreciate seeing a date somewhere so I can assess whether it's relevant to me and the times, or not.

I wonder if no dates will eventually anger the Google to the point of disregarding all content that is NOT dated? Oh wouldn't that be somethin'....

I currently have my post dated in the url. Like http://mysite.com/2015/07/08/post name/ if I change the permalink structure to exclude the date... will all the indexed and inner site links stop working?

Google do not care but visitors could care.

Agree on not clicking results with old dates (last time was minutes ago searching for something JavaScript related, among the first results were a lot from up to 10 years ago, I bet they are good resources, but I'll stick with the newer ones as everything in the field moves so fast).

Then again, this thread made me ask: does Google cares if you have dates on your posts/articles? Because I'm sure they know how old your content is regardless, like they know when they crawled it the first time.

I personally dislike when articles don't have a date (or only show the day/month, yeah, of what year???), but would not show them myself if that meant less traffic. I know, I know.

No dates. Topic/keywords in the url. It is too easy for content to be tainted by an associated (visible) date being anything more than a few months old.

Yesterday I was looking for an answer to a WP problem. I skipped over most of the first two pages of results, which would have been Google's estimation of the most relevant, helpful, information for my search, because I could see from the index that the posts were dated.

I figured there has been so many WP upgrades since 2009, 2010, 2011, etc. and even a couple upgrades this year that the old information most probably was not the best for me.

If those posts had not used dates and I clicked the article to find the handy dandy plugin they were touting was last updated 5 years ago, I would immediately lose respect for the site.

So regarding software, which normally changes frequently, I would expect dates.

On the other hand, something like Ctrl-C (copy something to the clipboard in Windows) has worked from the beginning - many, many years. So that software related information is evergreen - it won't likely ever change.

I've seen, no proof but I'm sure of it, news organizations that recycle news. Something like a man was thrown off a flight because he was too fat. Nobody died, no names were mentioned, etc. so why not recycle it. If I read the story the first time then I may read it the second time too and I'm sure I have. The second time I've always had a feeling of deja vu but at the end of the day it really doesn't effect my daily life so I just move on. If they recycled something like a July 4th threat to blow up the local mall, yeah that would make me angry and I would lose all respect and trust for the news organization.

Mark

It really depends on the niche as someone looking for software or games would be looking for the newest content where as if you are looking for the best way to walk your dog or how to plant tomatoes probably does not make much of a difference.
Shane

If you see a date and it's old you don't trust it and click away. People want current information, the latest view, so why would you discourage them?

I tend to favor not showing the dates either. But why do you think Pat Flynn keeps the post dates on his blog?

Whether it's a good idea to show post dates depends on the type of posts and content. I've always removed post dates on my Wordpress sites because the content is not time-related and old content is just as relevant as new content. Showing dates would be counter-productive.

I agree with Coach Comeback. Taking the dates off may in fact improve your rankings. If I see dates when I do a Google search, I am going to skip over older posts.
You should, however, try to get activity by getting comments on the posts.
You can achieve this by joining groups relevant to your niche and interacting with members. If one of your posts answers a question someone in the group asks then you can leave a link to that post.

Ask yourself this: if you were surfing online for a specific topic, and found a post that was several years old, would YOU click that link? As long as you're not referencing a recent news event, you should pull the date.

If you are continuously updating your blog then I think you can keep dates with each post. This will tell people that you are blogging for a long period of time.

I think the question to you would be how often are you updating your blog.

If you update it on a regular basis and plan to keep it that way, having the dates show would be a clear benefit as your viewer would know they are having fresh content served up to them.

On the other hand, if you plan to just post up information and leave it there on display, removing the dates would be a better choice so that people will not get turned off by the lack of updates from your blog.

If the content is timeless, do it, else dont do it. It will simply confuse your readers more.

I have no idea how Google view it but yes, I will do it for evergreen niches. I don't like reading old newspaper myself, so I guess it's the same with blogs.

Yes I would recommend to remove them as well.

If they see a date from a year ago, people tend to move and find something with posts from this week.

Regardless of whether you date your page, people know how to find out when it was published. Try View Page Info. Every browser that I know of displays publication dates via the right-click menu. Publication dates are also available in Google's search engine, social media posts, and God knows what else you're using to broadcast your content.

So removing dates doesn't fool anybody except the person who removes them!

I would remove the date unless you're planning to constantly update your blog/site..

No, google doesn't care about that sort of thing. They are looking for updated content on blogs. How many times do you post a week?

My view has always been that it's bad to have dates.

The info can be good, the content can be well written...

But if the info is old I'm turned off.

Delete the dates and create truly "timeless" content.

For new users: if you are moving dates make sure your perma-link structure doesn't include them either.

Dates on post I thought were to show how current a site is...

Google actually like regularly updated content and so do blog viewers.

If you have just a static 4-5 page website that is for your brick and mortar business or a specific topic it maybe ok to remove dates but, If you have a blog people want to see updated stuff.

I have a blog that gets 700-1000 a day visitors that I update every few days or so, when I get lazy and don't update my site I get 200-300 then when I update number goes up... Showing me people don't like to look at the same post I have on my front page.

Even if it's a static website why not have a blog section so people can get further value and Google can get what it wants?

I've kicked this around myself for awhile. Looking at my own surfing habits, I have a tendency to skip on posts that are more than a year or so old. So I can certainly see the value in NOT having a post date shown on the site.
I don't know if it has any effect with Google, but I think it has a huge effect on your readers.
Based on what I read on a couple of articles, I'm thinking I will remove the dates from the posts on my site.
Thanks for asking the question and starting the conversation.