Google’s John Mueller recommends to keep dates on articles for recognizing evergreen high-quality content

There has often been a debate regarding one topic when it comes to publishing articles. This topic is regarding the articles which have dates in them and ones that don’t. People have often asked the question regarding the effect of not putting dates on their articles.

For example, you have published an article on your website which is regarding an evergreen topic. Therefore, your article would appear old when you look at the date in a few years time. But if you avoid putting dates, the article does not look old.

For this reason, many publishers like to hide the dates from their evergreen articles. Because we know that relevance is one of the factors in SEO. Google also prefers content that is constantly updated. We also saw reports that publishers are just changing dates of an article to make it look updated. But John Mueller from Google has already revealed that this tactic does not help at all.

Now, John reveals that you should keep dates for evergreen content on your website too. This is because he says that dates make high-quality content which is evergreen, easier to recognize. On the other hand, if there is no date in the article then the quality of an article might not be gauged.

Basically, the user asked John whether it is “better to not have any dates of content published at all vs dates that are really ancient?”. What the user wants to ask is that is it better from an SEO perspective to hide the dates or to have older dates.

On this, John Mueller replied saying “Better for me is to know what the date was, that makes it easier to recognize high-quality evergreen content.” He also added that “What’s wrong with providing a date? If users are going there for information, a date can be pretty useful.” on the question of content not being evergreen.