Should I put the date on a new content page to show users when it was written or updated?
-
I've been asked this question at work and not certain of the answer.
Personally if I see an 'old' date in a meta description on Google I often scan for more recent articles. In other words it can act as a deterrent.
We are a very big social networking site with a large content section. For some of our content the date might be relevant, such as legal information, but often it isn't.
Are there any SEO factors in dating content?
-
I think it is pretty dependent on the content. It sounds like an overly simplistic answer, but I'd consider using the date when it is time-relevant content and not when it isn't. That way you are only showing relevant, useful content to the users - which has to be good for all. If it helps with CTR from the SERPs then all the better!
Google knows (at least roughly) when the content went up whether you date it or not, so it really is about what you are showing the user both on page and in the snippet. So why bother them with it if it isn't relevant?
-
I have content which is dated and several years old but still ranking for relatively competitive terms on the first page top 3 results and have seen increases in the last few months for ranking. I would however be wary of putting a date on content, as you rightly mention, as most people including you and I will do a search for information and if the date is clear in the SERPs and it hasn't been published recently then you don't click on it. In terms of this I would not be as concerned about the SEO but more the user engagement / CTR.
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
-
Best practice for Wordpress /page/2/
I realize that it might be a minor point but it still bugs me. We have a blog with a number of posts. Content of the posts does not expire or age (in the rare case something changes, we do update the information in the posts). The wordpress blog is setup to display our latest posts and displays 15 posts at once. Since we have a lot of content, the older posts get pushed off the front page which is understandable and desirable behavior. However the pages that have older posts have names like "/page/2/", /page/3/, /page/4/ and so on. This does not look very SEO or user friendly to me. What do you think? Did you come up with something better then /page/ and then a number?
Content Development | | SirMax0 -
Is paid content a good or bad thing
Hi, over the past couple of years we have turned down thousands of request from companies to have paid editorial on our sites, I have always turned this down but i have seen some sites accept this and would like to know your stance on this. In newspapers and magazines which i have worked in both, they have paid editorial all the time, so i am just wondering what google thinks of paid editorial. look forward to hearing your thoughts
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Matt Cutts and Curated Content -- something is confusing here...
Okay, I read an interview somewhere this week where Matt Cutts said he didn't care much for curated content. Today I searched on that subject and came up with the following video of his: http://youtu.be/zZU7O1BHfyo So, in the video he is going along and saying not to just grab content and repost it. And then at around minute 3:15 he says that, on the other hand, you can have a blog like DaringFireball.net and that's a good thing, because the blogger takes the time to pick and choose what he is posting. I went to Daring Fireball to take a look, and I saw that he writes maybe one line of commentary, and then pastes in a big chunk of the curated content along with a link to the source. This shocked me. How could Matt like that blog -- he keeps telling that he likes original not duplicate, curated content. So, the difference is that a blog can get away with this if they exercise discretion in what they choose to copy and paste? How the hell would the Google algorithm know what the intention of the blogger is? And here I've been wasting my time writing up paragraphs and paragraphs to precede any excerpts I paste in, in fear of getting hit by Google. I'd like to hear your comments on this.
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Duplicate content
Hi I keep getting errors for duplicate content and long url, when i look at these pages its all related to the news pages on my sites how do i define each new news article?
Content Development | | emmanis0 -
Crawl error vs RSS feed content
Hi, I have a BuddyPress Multisite with sites dedicated to specific RSS feeds. I did this to pull in the content for my users. But they generate a 1000s of SEMOZ errors/warnings for dup content, dup titles, missing metatags. etc. So does keeping the content help my site SEO less than the errors? The content is not under my control so I have no way to relate it to my keywords. Any opinions? I can recreate these RSS sites, so I will probably delete them to see what happens. Larry
Content Development | | tishimself0 -
Duplicate Page Content WordPress blog with categories?
Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content". Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages. None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories. Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error? Any thing I should be doing differently? Thanks!
Content Development | | frankthetank20 -
Block Low Quality Pages?
What are your thoughts on blocking (in robots.txt) and/or noindexing low-quality pages to defend against Panda, assuming you can't remove, redirect, or add quality content to it? Also, assume there are no external links pointing to these low-quality pages, no social shares, and zero incoming organic traffic. Has anyone had experience with this as a solution to Panda?
Content Development | | poolguy0 -
Duplicate Content - Video
I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update. I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created. I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it. And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance
Content Development | | poolguy0