Why I Don’t Date Stamp My Blog Articles

if your article is truly timeless, having a date on it will not change that.

I automatically rank content without source/time aspect lower than information with a proper context and that includes a date when it was created/thought about/written.

context is important and should be part of your content.

That's not very clever. Nothing is more annoying than the absence of a timestamp on an article. Often I don't even bother reading such articles.

But... I read the title of your post, and the lack of date/time makes me discard it IMMEDIATELY. I HATE articles with no date stamp. No, seriously, I didn't read what you wrote. I have no idea what you said.

If you're writing includes anything technical (and frankly if it in any way references society,) then I see it as almost a duty to datestamp, otherwise it's impossible to infer context. It doesn't become timeless, it becomes potentially misleading.

Great way to make your articles unciteable.

> My article Twitter Marketing Tips has always had good momentum considering when it was first published (guess). I know if I published the date… people would think “dude, this is so old… things must have moved on”.

And when things do move on in such a way to make those tips invalid, people will keep finding that article and be misled.

The simple solution is to put a "last updated" date on your article (or at least a last updated year). Then every few months or every year or so, go through and update the last updated date if the article is still relevant.

Because you don't want me to read them.

See, I take the opposite view for the same reason. I see the contextual information like date as informative in my own posts and in others. An outrageous post looks less outrageous posted in a time when our knowledge of the world was different. Insight that's on the mark is that much more prescient if someone made it well before anyone else saw that same insight.

I think there are probably good reasons not to provide context for your posts, just like there are times that it makes more sense to post anonymously (or pseudonymously), but I don't think this post makes a good case for removing context like post date by default.

I remember reading the same blog post in 1997, kinda makes you wonder