Absolutely. I actually did that for a while here. But let’s look at the Pros and Cons.
Why would you want to do this?
For most people I would guess that they don’t want readers put off by reading old content. The date usually shows up in a Google Search like this.
I know when I search Google I’ll often scan down the page a bit looking for the right result. Sometimes I’m put off by an older post. That’s why some authors like to hide the date.
Another reason is that they don’t write often and don’t want the blog to reflect that. That makes sense to me as well.
Why would you NOT want to do this?
- If a lot of your content is time sensitive (like current market reports) you’ll be doing your readers a disservice in not prominently showing the date. Nothing burns me more than wasting time reading a data report only to find out it was not for the time period I thought it was. Dates in blog posts were put there for that reason.
- It’s all of nothing. If you remove the dates from your posts it’s removed from ALL your posts. Even if you are not doing ‘market reports’, if you remove the dates you’ll look pretty silly having a post about some kid’s park from 5 years ago – because now it’s a condo development. Unless you plan on deleting or updating all your posts on a regular basis, your date helps you save face. I write a lot about social media (and it changes fast) and this is why my posts have dates again.
- Google knows exactly when you published posts and even if you try to hide the date, they might just show in the results anyway.
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