Time Stamps: the Pros, Cons, When & Where

[Samwise89]

I was thinking about this on my current site. What's the real purpose of putting the publish date of a post on the post? Why should we?

All I could think of was that there is zero reason to have a time stamp on evergreen content. I can understand on an actively updated blog style entertainment site, sure. But even then... why?

Does it provide any positives to the user?

I know you could use it to trick the users into thinking your content is older. You can't really trick Google because I think all it's going to care about is when it first indexed it. It might display an older date if you show it, but it won't believe it's older.

What do you guys think about time stamps?

 

[Sutra]

Depends on the type of content you have. If knowing the date helps the reader put the post into context it could be useful. I removed it from my sites though. My content doesn't need the date to put it into context. Don't want people to see an older date and dismiss it off the bat as "old" and decide not to read/share it.