PB058: Should I Use Timestamps on My Blog?

Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

How to Decide Whether to Include the Date on Your Blog Posts

Today’s episode is all about how to decide whether to include the date on your blog posts. I received this question from a listener, who noticed that I use timestamps on one of my blogs, but not on the other. Dates can either add or take away from your blog. I share how I decided what to do with each of my blogs and tips for you to work out what is right for you.

In This Episode

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

• Why including the date on your blog posts can be a good or bad thing
• How to work out if the date is relevant to each blog post
• Why I don’t include dates on my blog posts on the Digital Photography School blog
• Where to include dates on your blog posts
• Why it might be useful to include dates on some blog posts but not others
• Why some bloggers choose to include dates on blog posts for 3-6 months and then remove them
• Why some bloggers include dates on the front page of their blog but not on each individual blog posts

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 58 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today, we’re talking about timestamps on blogs. I received this question from Bernadeth who wrote, “I’m in the process of redesigning my blog and was wondering if I should use timestamps on my blog posts. When I look at your blogs, I noticed that one does and one doesn’t. Can you tell us why you made that decision?” You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/58.

Bernadeth’s question is one that I get quite a bit. A lot of my readers do read both of my blogs, ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, and have realized that on one, the date that the post was written does appear on the blog, that’s ProBlogger and over on Digital Photography School, there are no dates as to when the post was written. My theory is that dates can either add to or take away from your blog posts. Let me explain that a little further.

When you put a date on your blog post, you signal to your readers when the post was written. There are no record signs there, that’s pretty obvious, I know. This is useful to your readers who want to make a judgment on how relevant the post is for them at any point in time. It signals to them that a post is either current, recent, or that it is dated when the year is older and dated.

There’s a problem here and that is when you have a timeless or evergreen piece of content. By that piece of content, that doesn’t really date. The principles that you write about today might still be relevant in 10 years’ time. When you put a date on that type of content, it can act as a distraction to your reader.

When they arrive at a blog post and see it was written in 2007, like many of the posts on Digital Photography School, a little warning bell goes off in their mind that they are reading a post that is not current. I’ve had comments on this type of post, numerous times, saying, “This post is out of date,” or, “This post is old,” even when the content in the post is still completely relevant for today. When a reader has this reaction, no matter what information your post contains, it’ll seem old to them and they lose engagement with the post.

This may not happen to everyone, I suspect, most of us listening to this going, “No, I’m willing to learn from old stuff,” but I reckon it happens to most of us, at least on a subconscious level.

On the flip side of this, time dates can be good on evergreen content when the date is recent. If you arrive at a post and you see that it was written last month, psychologically, we’re more open to that type of content because it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s a new idea even if it is exactly the same idea that was written in 2006. Dates can be good and they can be bad. They can make your post seem dated or they can make your post seem cutting edge.

What’s a blogger to do? Should we have dates on our posts? For me, the way I determine whether I put a date on a post or not is to ask, is the date going to be relevant to the post in some way? The answer to this really is to let me take two different courses of action on my ...