Dates in the blog posts - on, off or regularly updated

[SirMax]

Hello Moz community,

We have a blog where we post what we believe is very valuable, unique content for our niche. The content frequently stays very relevant for our visitor for many many years.

In terms of both user engagement and SEO, should we keep the dates in our blog posts?

Should we remove them?

Should we go through every blog post and edit it slightly every week even if there is no meaningful information we can add?

Should employ some kind of plugin that does update the blog post date automatically?

[RobCairns]

Hi Max,

This one is fairly straightforward - I wouldn't worry too much about the dates on the articles/posts as compared to what quality they present to your readers. RankBrain is looking at more than age when it is ranking your content (although age plays a role). More important than age, however, is the user interaction with the content.

If your content is unique and holds value for years, then dates shouldn't be an issue. If you are simply updating posts for the sake of updating posts, I doubt it will help very much when there are definitely more productive things you can be doing such as generating links or working on user experience or CRO (if your industry is open to such strategies).

Again, for user engagement, I wouldn't sweat it. Most users will click through on the first few results in SERPs regardless of when the article was written. The rest will likely come to your article if they do not find answers in more recent articles or posts. The only way changing the posts to alter their date makes sense to me is if someone submits an updated version of your content following a change in your industry.

Hope this advice helps!

All the best,

Rob

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Completely agree with Rob! Doesn't matter in any way usually if you keep or remove it. Even as a publisher ourselves we tested it and what we mostly noticed is that almost nobody cares ;).