How many people type the whole URL and how many access it over Google, QR code, or from other site? This is good if content is unique. I find URLs with dates useful when I want to quickly assess how fresh is the content.
I often find articles that don't have the date at all, and the information turns out to be really out of date. Is hiding the date some kind of SEO trend?
> I often find articles that don't have the date at all
I hate this trend, one theory I heard was that it helps the content appear "ever-green".
Another theory is that it helps hide inactivity of content updates; like 100s of articles will be produced in a short span of time and then nothing for months or even years.
But doesn't their crawler keep track of when a page first appeared, and when it's updated? I wouldn't expect just removing the date to work in this regard, but I don't know.
> I often find articles that don't have the date at all
At the same time I also always find articles that have an "Updated at" timestamp of a few days ago, I guess that's somehow done automatically to gain some recency points for SEO, not sure if that or removing the timestamp is more annoying.
