A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.
I have actually three dates on my blog [1], (1) the date I started writing a post (hardcoded in the url/name), (2) the date it was first published (defined in the markdown frontmatter) and (3) the date a post was last modifed (based on git commits). I think all three are relevant.
I like the second and third date but I think the first is perhaps a little confusing to me without this context. If I didn't know this is what it meant I'd of thought they'd be some bug in your blog or you forgot to update the url
And even if you see dates, quite often they're relative. A year ago could mean a lot.
Oh, and while blogs are usually newest on top, relative dates break the ability to derive sort order by looking at multiple values, if they're all the same.
A similar thing that really perplexes me is that GitHub uses relative dates. You try to find the date a certain change was made, and you end up scrolling through page after page of "six years ago."
It feels like the sort of thing that is only really sticking around because it was a design trend many years ago when some of these apps were written.
Others have commented on it being SEO-related, but I think there might be a psychological component to it as well, where you don’t want people to bounce because they think it’s an old and irrelevant article.
It used to be that a book or magazine issue needed to have a copyright notice including the year of publication or it didn't get copyright protection. That was a good rule.
Google knows whether your content is recent or not regardless if you have a timestamp on it, because they crawl periodically and according to recent leaks they do store this information.
It's hard to tell if they use it. Most of SEO is just cargo-culting because of how difficult it is to experiment with it. Somebody once said it helped them to remove the date, and now everyone does it. Maybe google is using it, or was using it at some point. Maybe they use the date in structured data [1] because it's easier to get and potentially more reliable (telling content changes and theme changes apart isn't trivial), and people just noticed that if they turn off the date feature in their CMS their articles rank better.
Unfortunately, it's not hard to make a few tweaks though and have it look "updated" to the crawler. I imagine Google could change that (especially now with LLM tech possibilities) so I guess we'll see what happens, but so far it hasn't hurt the career "optimizers" that I know.
The for-profit web surfs the eternal wave of "now". Anything that happened in the past is disregarded by search indexes, social media, and people using them.
My URLs have the date in them, and all posts have the original date near the title. I do updates (and update internal metadata), but removed the modification date because it was confusing to people…
