8 ms·

A couple of observations from someone who has a scattershot blog: * Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search

A couple of observations from someone who has a scattershot blog: * Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search engine or link and maybe glance at your homepage once. The most popular page on my site (by far) was something I wrote 3 years ago - it still gets hits but that doesn't translate into regular readers. * Nobody really follows blogs by subscribing to feeds. OK, obviously some people do but it is small fraction of site readers. And of those that do, only a small fraction regularly visit the sites they are subscribed to. The upshot is that you are better thinking of your blog as a set of independent articles rather than an actual Web Log. Publication dates are important to gauge how up-to-date the information is but almost no-one is going to scroll through a date-sorted index. If you want users to browse around after they have read the first article, implement some sort of Related Articles or tagging system to arrange your content by topic.

Jaruzel 6y ago
> Nobody reads posts in chronological order. No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.
- Tomte 6y ago
  Does that really work? I would doubt that, without having any "SEO knowledge". Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling. And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
- brudgers 6y ago
  You're advocating arranging my thoughts so a web crawling bot can sell more ads. Fuck Google.
  - hacym 6y ago
    That's not what SEO does. SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches. If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?
    - brudgers 6y ago
      SEO distracts writers from writing. It's a rabbit hole of unproductive efforts when the goal is to write. The hard part of writing is writing something good. SEO doesn't make writers write better and this piece of writing isn't here because of SEO. It's here because it is intellectually interesting and because an actual human submitted it to Hacker News and because other actual humans voted it up. What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.
      - johnchristopher 6y ago
        SEO is only a part of your strategy to get eyeballs in front of your text. SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) are important (more ore less, depending on your product).
        brudgers 6y ago
        SEO is not part of my strategy at all. I try to avoid optimization whenever practical because optimization is a distraction from just getting on with the work.
        hacym 6y ago
        Luckily, there are projects that will do it for you. But it seems like your motivation isn't to actually drive traffic to your site, but instead just to do work for the sake of doing it? I'm not sure. Avoiding "optimization whenever practical" is a very strange concept.
- AndrewStephens 6y ago
  If that were really the case then everyone would make dynamic pages that always claimed to be created 6 hours ago. In reality Google knows perfectly well when the page was created (or first seen by their spider, which is almost the same thing these days) without relying on metadata.
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    Or Google uses the date a signal to reinforce when it's not sure and to downrank when it catches liars.
hacym 6y ago
Not having dates is a bad idea... Even if it's just for context. If this article was posted in 2018, things have changed a little bit since 2020...
- ChrisArchitect 6y ago
  yeah exactly, dates may not be important in some contexts, but we're talking about information display - on the browse... area of your blog or index page -- it may be important to the reader to know when something was written/posted. i.e. I went browse to see more posts on that site and saw a post called 'Work From Home', with no date. I wanted to know if it was written ages ago or perhaps very recently when working from home became very relevant to today's coronavirus society. Also, I think for better or worse, as internet surfers, we've come to expect things to be somewhat sorted chronologically as default, so unless you're pulling some 'highlight' articles out to feature etc, we're conditioned to expect the list/index as date sorted for the most part....
- smithmayowa 6y ago
  Hey so sorry to do this but I have a question for you regarding your getting into the Georgia tech masters program without a bachelor degree my email: smithmayowa20 at gmail dot com.

Jaruzel 6y ago

> Nobody reads posts in chronological order. No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.

Tomte 6y ago
Does that really work? I would doubt that, without having any "SEO knowledge". Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling. And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
brudgers 6y ago
You're advocating arranging my thoughts so a web crawling bot can sell more ads. Fuck Google.
- hacym 6y ago
  That's not what SEO does. SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches. If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?
  - brudgers 6y ago
    SEO distracts writers from writing. It's a rabbit hole of unproductive efforts when the goal is to write. The hard part of writing is writing something good. SEO doesn't make writers write better and this piece of writing isn't here because of SEO. It's here because it is intellectually interesting and because an actual human submitted it to Hacker News and because other actual humans voted it up. What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      SEO is only a part of your strategy to get eyeballs in front of your text. SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) are important (more ore less, depending on your product).
      - brudgers 6y ago
        SEO is not part of my strategy at all. I try to avoid optimization whenever practical because optimization is a distraction from just getting on with the work.
        hacym 6y ago
        Luckily, there are projects that will do it for you. But it seems like your motivation isn't to actually drive traffic to your site, but instead just to do work for the sake of doing it? I'm not sure. Avoiding "optimization whenever practical" is a very strange concept.
AndrewStephens 6y ago
If that were really the case then everyone would make dynamic pages that always claimed to be created 6 hours ago. In reality Google knows perfectly well when the page was created (or first seen by their spider, which is almost the same thing these days) without relying on metadata.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  Or Google uses the date a signal to reinforce when it's not sure and to downrank when it catches liars.

hacym 6y ago

Not having dates is a bad idea... Even if it's just for context. If this article was posted in 2018, things have changed a little bit since 2020...

ChrisArchitect 6y ago
yeah exactly, dates may not be important in some contexts, but we're talking about information display - on the browse... area of your blog or index page -- it may be important to the reader to know when something was written/posted. i.e. I went browse to see more posts on that site and saw a post called 'Work From Home', with no date. I wanted to know if it was written ages ago or perhaps very recently when working from home became very relevant to today's coronavirus society. Also, I think for better or worse, as internet surfers, we've come to expect things to be somewhat sorted chronologically as default, so unless you're pulling some 'highlight' articles out to feature etc, we're conditioned to expect the list/index as date sorted for the most part....
smithmayowa 6y ago
Hey so sorry to do this but I have a question for you regarding your getting into the Georgia tech masters program without a bachelor degree my email: smithmayowa20 at gmail dot com.