I once worked at a place where the marketing team explicitly removed dates from corporate blog posts for SEO purposes.
The idea was that some content is, or benefits from being perceived as, "evergreen". Always relevant.
Maybe -- but it's still deceptive, I think.
On the other hand, even here on HN we see people talking about "unmaintained" GitHub repos where the last commit was more than a few months ago. So, recency-bias is a real thing, and marketers certainly don't want to be penalized for honesty. :)
This was a while ago. Nowadays, the obvious opposite extreme is common. Blogspam that is "updated" with a current date, but no changes to content.
And the more date-specific 'best thing 2025' articles also update titles to match current year. Email is already a wasteland of notifications and things I haven't unsubscribed to after buying something. Web is now a wasteland of SEO optimized content. I'm bummed it's gone this way. Looking forward to AI becoming monetized in a similar way by inserting product placement etc.
quesera|9 months ago
The idea was that some content is, or benefits from being perceived as, "evergreen". Always relevant.
Maybe -- but it's still deceptive, I think.
On the other hand, even here on HN we see people talking about "unmaintained" GitHub repos where the last commit was more than a few months ago. So, recency-bias is a real thing, and marketers certainly don't want to be penalized for honesty. :)
This was a while ago. Nowadays, the obvious opposite extreme is common. Blogspam that is "updated" with a current date, but no changes to content.
bravoetch|9 months ago