Should I remove post date from posts in my website?

52 replies
Hi all,

Newbie here. I have this website which I run on Wordpress. The content on the website is general information not time sensitive. Website also not regularly updated since the topic I cover doesnt change much often.

Removing the post date could really help the site to make the content solid and not look outdated.

My question is that removing the date from posts will affect my any rankings? Does google care?

I'm planning on using a wordpress plugin to easily stop showing the published date on posts.

Let me know about your thoughts.

Thank you
#date #post #posts #remove #website #wordpress post date
  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author Coach Comeback
    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
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    • Profile picture of the author Trevor Carr
      Originally Posted by Coach Comeback View Post

      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
      I totally agree with that, Coach Comeback

      If you don't see a date, you are more likely to engage as you really don't know how old it is.

      But I do wonder if Google throws any weight on the date (nice rhyme )?

      So long as there is regular fresh, good quality content, I don't think you can go wrong though.

      So, given the choice, and would not show the dates :-)
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    • Profile picture of the author fernelis2009
      Originally Posted by Coach Comeback View Post

      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
      Totally agree!

      I do the same, I´m always looking for the most new information.
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  • Profile picture of the author awledd
    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.
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  • Just pull the year. leave the month and day.
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    • I have to agree with the previous comments. I also tend to dismiss a page if it's several years old. I know this isn't really fair, but I suppose it's human nature (or at least human nature in the internet age ).

      Still, I was actually pretty annoyed when I saw an internet marketing blog that didn't have dates. How can you know if something is still true when discussing Kindle or Facebook?
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      • Profile picture of the author BeverlyTaylor
        My niche is personal development, so it's basically evergreen. I have all the dates removed from blog posts, although they do show up in the Archives by month, if a person clicks to away from the home page.
        I agree with the posts above that in general, it's best to delete the date. If a person sees that it's old, in my niche the info may be just fine, but having several old posts with gaps in between may give a negative impression that the blogger isn't marketing their website very well.
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    • Profile picture of the author Coach Comeback
      Originally Posted by GarlandBergeron View Post

      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!
      Sad but true. The content could still be just as effective today as it was then, say, for something evergreen (like meditation or learning a skill or something) but I even go as far as to change the setting in google to default to only show posts from the last 3 months It is not right, but we do it. So removing the date would keep me on your site if the title was exactly what I was looking for.

      Originally Posted by TerranceCharles View Post

      If your content isn't time sensitive and evergreen, then it's fine to remove the post date - I went with this technique around 2010 and over the years, noticing it helped big time. Some of my older content is still shared on social media till this day. However, they will see the time stamp in the comment section on when the comment was left.

      But, by that time they've already more than likely read the blog post and deciding wether to share or not - they still share it. As far as wether it affects your search engine ranking, that's a good question - I have not seen any change, but I don't know the answer to that.
      I had this same problem. On posts with a ton of comments the date still showed up on the comments. I did this simple copy and paste job in the theme edit section. I am not techy ... AT ALL.. and I figured this out.

      My only gripe is it removes ALL data. So the name, gravatar as well as date of the commentor is removed. Use if you find it necessary

      https://thematictheme.com/forums/top...from-comments/


      Originally Posted by totalprocessing.net View Post

      Just pull the year. leave the month and day.

      Never thought about that. Pretty nifty. May give this a shot... If I could ever figure out how lol
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  • Profile picture of the author ksummers
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author GarlandBergeron
    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!
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    • Profile picture of the author TerranceCharles
      If your content isn't time sensitive and evergreen, then it's fine to remove the post date - I went with this technique around 2010 and over the years, noticing it helped big time. Some of my older content is still shared on social media till this day. However, they will see the time stamp in the comment section on when the comment was left.

      But, by that time they've already more than likely read the blog post and deciding wether to share or not - they still share it. As far as wether it affects your search engine ranking, that's a good question - I have not seen any change, but I don't know the answer to that.
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  • Profile picture of the author winnermarketing
    Don t remove data if you speak about a technical theme!
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  • Profile picture of the author FarNext
    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!
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  • Profile picture of the author hardworker2013
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author igorGriffiths
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author Raydal
    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
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  • Profile picture of the author essmeier
    I never use dates. All a date does is tell someone how old the post is. That's not useful to me.

    Charlie
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  • Profile picture of the author Randall Magwood
    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
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  • Profile picture of the author tracyaustin
    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'....
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  • Profile picture of the author Tom Dean
    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?
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  • Profile picture of the author Adrian112
    Google do not care but visitors could care.
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  • Profile picture of the author arojilla
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author CapnWillard
    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.
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    • Profile picture of the author Chris Grable
      I Predict: It won't be long before Google considers undated content to be spam. It goes directly to the user experience and the bulk of the comments here prove it. If people ignore old posts... that MUST indicate that they prefer... maybe even trust fresher content.

      Cheers,
      chris
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  • Profile picture of the author Mark Singletary
    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
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  • Profile picture of the author Shane Dolby
    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
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  • Profile picture of the author jazbo
    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?
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  • Profile picture of the author rotface
    Originally Posted by ChanceNine View Post

    Hi all,

    Newbie here. I have this website which I run on Wordpress. The content on the website is general information not time sensitive. Website also not regularly updated since the topic I cover doesnt change much often.

    Removing the post date could really help the site to make the content solid and not look outdated.

    My question is that removing the date from posts will affect my any rankings? Does google care?

    I'm planning on using a wordpress plugin to easily stop showing the published date on posts.

    Let me know about your thoughts.

    Thank you
    I tend to favor not showing the dates either. But why do you think Pat Flynn keeps the post dates on his blog?
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    • Profile picture of the author Nillionaire
      Funny I should stumble across this thread after looking into how to remove dates from WP posts earlier today

      For the guys who are "pro-date removal" - does anyone have any recommended plugins that aren't 3 years out of date?!
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      • Profile picture of the author Devilfish168

        I also ask this questions but I remind to put the date.

        because at least show visitors hey I always update my site.
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        • Profile picture of the author itworked
          I modified wordpress to display the date the post was modified. And I DO show the date. I do it for the reason many above say they don't do it. My content is in an evergreen niche, so when I show a date on my posts that is relatively recent I believe it attracts MORE clicks to my content than the competing content because the competition either shows no date at all or an old date.

          Yes this gives me incentive to update the pages from time to time and that is a good thing to do anyway.
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          • Profile picture of the author easy does it
            Originally Posted by itworked View Post

            I modified wordpress to display the date the post was modified. And I DO show the date. I do it for the reason many above say they don't do it. My content is in an evergreen niche, so when I show a date on my posts that is relatively recent I believe it attracts MORE clicks to my content than the competing content because the competition either shows no date at all or an old date.

            Yes this gives me incentive to update the pages from time to time and that is a good thing to do anyway.
            Thanks for that suggestion. I noticed a site that has "Last updated on DATE" and that made me more interested as I felt the content was current and that the owner was proactive. Can I ask you... how did you modify wordpress to display the date the post was modified?

            Tom
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      • Profile picture of the author wentzco
        Originally Posted by Nillionaire View Post

        Funny I should stumble across this thread after looking into how to remove dates from WP posts earlier today

        For the guys who are "pro-date removal" - does anyone have any recommended plugins that aren't 3 years out of date?!
        I was thinking the same thing as I have a date remover plug-in on one of my sites that hasn't been updated in 4 years. I just checked & see one plugin that was updated yesterday called "WP Old Post Date Remover" but haven't given it a try as of yet. (2 others I just found - "WP Author, Date and Meta Remover" & "WP Meta and date remover")



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  • Profile picture of the author stackman
    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.
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  • 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author ajdrag
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author Robert999
    Originally Posted by ChanceNine View Post

    Hi all,

    Newbie here. I have this website which I run on Wordpress. The content on the website is general information not time sensitive. Website also not regularly updated since the topic I cover doesnt change much often.

    Removing the post date could really help the site to make the content solid and not look outdated.

    My question is that removing the date from posts will affect my any rankings? Does google care?

    I'm planning on using a wordpress plugin to easily stop showing the published date on posts.

    Let me know about your thoughts.

    Thank you
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author LesterRussell
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author allseowork
    If the content is timeless, do it, else dont do it. It will simply confuse your readers more.
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    • Profile picture of the author Boris Qs
      It is true when making a search on Google I do look at the dates how old the content is whether the content is outdated or not.If it is outdated I usually move on.I usually go through the first page and scan to see if there is any recent content on the topic I am interested in.

      If I do not find any recent content I usually go for any with no date.But usually when I click through to the site with no dates and read the content I am usually still unsure if the content is an outdated content or recent one.so I in most cases I keep on searching.Now that also shows if one does not put the date all you get is just traffic with no conversion which is what I will guess most marketers are looking for.Conversion and that usually come when the lead is satisfied or convinced with what they are searching for on a particular site.

      So in my humble opinion recent post dates do affect traffic positively while older dates affect traffic negatively. But if the dates include the word updated I feel very confident reading it especially if the update, date is recent, if not I know I will be search for something over that date which if I don't find I end up coming back to the updated post as oppose to those with no dates.I do not know if that makes any sense but that is my 5 cent contribution LOL
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  • Profile picture of the author waken
    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.
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  • 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author nmwf
    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!
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  • Profile picture of the author MrFarmer
    I would remove the date unless you're planning to constantly update your blog/site..
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  • Profile picture of the author extrememan
    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?
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    • Profile picture of the author Devilfish168
      I feel is like giving a visitor a small notice telling them hey this site always update new contents.

      I been to sites where they never put dates and " sometime you might think is new content etc "

      but if you go back two times you will know " is a site without new contents".
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  • Profile picture of the author TexasSteve
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author rhinocl
    For new users: if you are moving dates make sure your perma-link structure doesn't include them either.
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  • Profile picture of the author Andre Slater
    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?
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  • Profile picture of the author bigb6905
    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.
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