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
-
Is a page with links to all posts okay?
Hi folks. Instead of an archive page template in my theme (I have my reasons), I am thinking of simply typing the post title as and when I publish a post, and linking to the post from there. Any SEO issues that you can think of? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
Howdy, I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it. We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.) We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC. Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated. BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps. Thanks, Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates0 -
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
How to remove the certain backlinks completely ?
Hello, I have deleted certain backlinks manually a few months ago. they dont longer exist. but even today Google Webmaster tools and MOZ backlink tool shows this backlinks. Why ? what i need to do to remove them completely ? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek990 -
Internal links to blog posts
I am linking manually to blog posts in my site from my Home page. Our site isn't set up with an auto "Recent Posts" that shows on Home. Should I use the exact blog post title as the anchor text or do I need to create something that is not an exact match to the title of the post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfiedel0 -
Removing Content 301 vs 410 question
Hello, I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website. I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware). Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content. The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere). This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience. When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. We cut the pages
2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages. When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway. We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way… I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover. We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda. So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions: 1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?
Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)? 2. If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did? Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric1 -
Are disavowed links removed from the GWMT?
Hi, I am disavowing some links. Does anyone know if Google removes them from the WMT?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is interesting for followup purposes. Thanks0