Seeing this article at Daily Blog Tips about removing the timestamp from posts got me thinking.
I get a significant amount of Google search engine traffic (50-60 percent on average) on my main blog (as well as my other ones), so I know many people are finding my site through single posts. And most of the content they are clicking on are my most popular posts … some of which were written more than 6 months ago.
So I’m doing this experiment … I’m taking the post date off my single post entries only and leaving them on my home page … so that people who come to my front page see timely, up-to-date content … but those who come through the backdoor don’t think it’s stale content (it’s not).
POST UPDATE ON HOW TO ACTUALLY TAKE OUT THE TIMESTAMP FROM POSTS: One of the commenters to this post mentioned he came because he wanted to know HOW to get rid of the date from posts. To do so, go into the Theme Editor and select the single.php and Main Index templates and take out this code:
< ?php the_time('F j, Y'); ? >
For more information on this tag, go the WP Codex page here.
I don’t think it really matters if the date is old, new, or not even available to be read. If the content is good then the page stands for itself no matter when it was written.
Thanks for the info…. but everyone (including me) is reading this coming from Google looking for answers on how to actually remove the date.
Richard, gotcha! See above, I updated the post to reflect what you were looking for. Thanks for the input!
That’s what I was looking for. I edited one line in single.php and index.php, and 3 lines in archive.php to remove the date, plus the ‘on’ text ahead of it. Thanks.
Good info Cory. Seems to be a lot of that here. Still enjoying my RockinTheme by the way. Thanks!!
MB
Hey Cory,
Curious – how did this test work out? Did you notice a difference in response (or whatever you were measuring) by removing the dates?
Angela
Angela, this is a hard thing to track, but I think it helps keep the content from looking stale. So I’m sticking with my theory. Hope this helps.
Removing the dates from your posts is self-serving and unfriendly to your users. Users are interested in the most up-to-date content out there. You are interested in page views and clicks. If you manipulate your users into visiting your pages, and then they discover that your content is stale, you will lose that user forever. Just like you’ve now lost me.
Jodi, it depends on the content … good content will last and this is more about your readers not pre-judging your content simply because you have a “born on” date.
Sorry you feel that way … wow.
This is great! I got all the dates out of my blog with the exception of the categories. Do you know where I need to edit to get the dates out of the categories?
Thanks!
Bryan, in WordPress, that’s typically in the Archives theme file …. in most themes, or at least mine, that’s where the Categories page is also found …
This works on the page template as well. Very important if you are using wordpress to build static sites with a blog feature.