I have removed date and time from my posts. Blog posts are mostly standalone articles which do not need a dated sequence. Some will feel that having dates are useful for reference or navigating a site, while some will just feel it is more organized to have some sort of chronological order for posts but I prefer the advantages of not timestamping posts.
Unless your blog is about the latest news-breaking technology or some time-sensitive topic such as blog contests or current events such as the recent PageRank update, there are compelling reasons to remove timestamping.
1. Good Information Is Timeless
People want fresh articles and having a date on articles no matter how good, serves only to make them seem outdated.
2. Higher Link Attraction
An article that is deemed outdated is less likely to be linked to by others.
3. Get More Comments
Even though existing comments would have dates on them, the article itself being not dated appears as being still fresh and thus readers are more likely to join in the comments.
4. Increase Marketing Potential
Articles are more marketable if they do not appear outdated as long as the topic itself is not about something current.
How To Remove Date And Time From Posts
Go to your theme editor and look for this code to remove:
< ?php the_time('F j, Y'); ? >
It can be found on the main index or home template, and single post template depending on your theme.
The same arguments go for not including dates in permalinks. You can change permalinks to leave out the date without breaking links by using a plugin.
See what A-list bloggers like ProBlogger and Steve Pavlina have to say about this at DailyBlogTips.
Although removing the time will make a post looks fresh, the natural characteristics of a blog which is the posts in a blog will be chronologically-ordered will make a post fall deep into the archive unless you often have trackbacks to your old posts in your new posts.
Understood. Posts will still get buried eventually unless you create a list of say, “Featured Posts” to keep them accessible from the homepage.
When someone arrives via search engine at a post that’s a year old, the “freshness” point could help.
However, the comments would still have timestamping in any case so that helps put some posts in perspective, time-wise.
Some bloggers choose to keep timestamping for their homepage only. It’s all personal preference really.
Sorry, that’s just not true. As a service to your readers you owe them the courtesy of telling them how “fresh” this information is.
A post written in 2002 is ancient in net terms even if the information is “timeless”.
As for the timelessness of information you might want to check your facts. There have been, quite literally, millions of books written in the last 100 years. Of those millions, there are very few that are considered timeless. The timeless books are not about anything like marketing or business, but about relationships–and those relationships are pretty narrow in scope (parent/child, lovers, friendships). If it is not about relationships it is about philosophical things which is a far narrower scope.
Curtis:
Thank you for your thoughts - you’ve got some strong arguments there.