Should I Remove Dates From My Old Posts
-
I have a web site that has content about home improvement topics but the site has no new content since 2010. All the posts on the wordpress site have the date which are all 2010 and prior. Is there a downside in terms of search engine rankings to remove the dates or changing the dates? What are the risks to removing the dates? Could I lose rankings if I do this? Do you have any personal experience with this situation?
-
Do any of your or anyone reading have any first hand experience with removing dates?
-
"Evergreen content" is my new favorite term! Wow I love it.
-
I agree with Jesse that you should create great new content with your users top of mind. I also like the idea of periodically updating evergreen content with a new post date. As far, as hurting your rankings, I think that simply removing the date from your post (or updating it without actually updating the content) could hurt your rankings in the longterm by damaging your credibility with your readers. If you incorporate your date into your URL structure (and/or index date-based archive pages), you need to consider preventing duplicate content issues by correctly implementing 301-redirects. The same goes for if you remove the dates from the articles (which is something I personally feel is bad for usability and do not recommend.)
-
What you should do is create some new content!
The dates aren't going to affect your SERPs at all. Google could care less. Where it looks bad is to the user. Forget about the search engine. People worry too much about how a robot will respond to their site when they should be worried about how a potential or current customer will respond to their site.
Focus on that aspect and the rest will trickle down from their. Google is trying to replicate human searching tendencies while attempting to clean the web up *(cause humans hate spam.) This is why the robot thing works. Get it? Robots imitate humans too! So what I'm saying is: FOCUS ON THE HUMAN!
If I arrive to your site and see the last time you posted new content was 3 years ago I'm going to be thinking "wow these guys are lazy, don't care, or just generally aren't on top of progressing in their field." So yeah. The dates will make a difference. But it might not trick people. It might still be obvious that your content is 3 years old.
The only way to truly solve this is by creating NEW CONTENT that kicks butt!
So there you go.
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
-
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
What link building techniques would you recommend for a dating site?
I am working on adding more content to the site (content marketing, trying to attract natural links), and this includes a blog. On-site optimization will be done based on good keyword research, and after that I will be working on link building for the site. I will pull backlink data of competing best performing dating websites, google-wise, and try to get some links from there. What other link building strategies / techniques could be good for this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blrs120 -
Dates in the URLs for a "hot" content website (tipping service)
Hi, I'm planning to build a website that will present games previews for different sports. I think that the date should be included in the URL as the content will be valuable until the kick off f the game. So first i want to know if this is the right approach and second the URL structure i have imagined is /tips/sport/competition/year/month/day Ex : /tips/football/premier_league/2013/11/05 Is this a good structure ? Guillaume.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betadvisor0 -
Is it possible to Remove Owner History from the GWMT?
Hello, As a site owner, I've worked with several SEO firms in the past. Even though a long time has passed, they still appear in the GWMT list of admins (though inactive). I wouldn't like other companies and consultants see that in the future. Is there a way to remove them? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Internal linking using exact keywords Bad – Post Panda
Internal linking using exact keywords Bad – Post Panda Any tips for internal linking ,how can we target landing pages to rank well using internal linking. Use of Keywords in within site links, is it bad? Are footer links bad? Use of Siloing artichture bad or good? What a best linking model for Ecommerce Site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
The Affects of Removing Anchor Texts from Super Menu on Homepage
Hi, Currently we have a div that drops down our super menu which has subcategories, ie. under Shop by Color (super menu) Black Ties, Blue Ties, Brown Ties, et, al. (see Ties.com Anchor Text image attached) If we were to remove these subcategories from the div (in other words, they do not get crawled from homepage, will we loose ranking for those keywords? We are trying to reduce link count on homepage. Thoughts? UBHu8.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ties.com0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Leveraging interest on a popular blog post, with a new, expanded page on the subject...
On a wordpress site, I have one blog post that performs extremely well for Adsense revenue. But the post is getting older and older, and requires me to place some updates into the article from time to time. It's a blog post, but really feels like more of a reference types page (it's about stocks in a particular industry). Now that I see so many people landing on this page through search (#1 for the term), I'm thinking I really should really develop this information further, and make a reference page out of this information and keep it updated, with a link to it from the nav menu. However, I don't know if it will be bad to have both the reference page and the old post page trying to rank for the same keyword term or not? (They won't be duplicate content, the new page will just the same topic rewritten and expanded). Is that something I can get penalized for? I'm getting very good income off of this existing blog post and don't want to mess it up, but I also know that only keeping this info on a post that's getting older and older is not a good long term plan, and I need to pounce on the interest in the subject matter. So, I see these options: 1. Create the new expanded page, and let Google sort it in the SERPs. 2. Create the new page and redirect the old blog post to the new page. That just doesn't seem right to remove access to my old blog post, though. Which of these is the right thing to do, or is there some way I'm not thinking of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0