Mar 01 2007 at 11:39am
All Web Content Should be Dated
This topic came up in no less than three independent conversations yesterday, beginning with GeoffreyF67’s post at SEOmoz proposing that dates be removed from blog posts. As many of the commenters pointed out, there are a lot of problems with this and I think his logic was pretty fuzzy to begin with.
I find it interesting that many of the commenters on that post feel that articles (different from blog posts) should not be dated. This is something I definitely disagree with. How many times have you come across content through a search and wondered when it was posted?
The web is getting old now – you could be reading content that was posted 6-8 years ago and not know it because it has no date. I was in a meeting yesterday and some people mentioned that people trust print materials more than web in some cases. They know that the University (or any organization) wouldn’t send them outdated print publications, which might not be the case with web pages.
As a webmaster, it’s easy to lose track of content you write. Pages get lost, you forget about them, or they end up buried in the depths of a deep site structure. If an organization doesn’t have a person dedicated to overseeing website content it may not get updated much at all. So what happens when people come across them on a search? How do they know if this information is relevant or not? I was impressed with a notice on PHP Mac which pointed out that the article I was reading might be out of date. Even when content does have a date people often don’t notice it.
The premise of the original post is that an old date is worse than no date at all. In that case you’re just not being honest with people. You’re withholding information that could be key to their search. In some cases, they may be intentionally looking for something that is from a certain time in the past. If you are researching something, do you trust content that has no date on it? Maybe, maybe not, but the date is certainly helpful information and, in some cases, crucial.
In many cases, as in the “how to make waffles” example cited in the SEOmoz article, it really doesn’t matter. However, as one commenter pointed out, you should be able to let the visitor decide if the date is relevant to them or not. If it’s not, then that’s just an extra piece of information that you could place in a less prominent position in the design.
I am planning on putting dates on all the web content I maintain. What about you? Do you think everything should be dated? Will you find a way to make sure the content you look after has a date on it?
