I never thought of keeping the comments off-bounds for the Kontera ads, but I like that idea. I’ll do that here in a minute!

Thanks Matt!

I had not considered the bloggers who re-hash their old content as a new post to make it appear fresh. I would, of course, see them cast in the same icky light. (Probably a worse light, even… as the shadiness of that practice is downright overt.)

In response to the Excel Formulas example… If the blogger had installed a 3rd party commenting system and left the dates in place and wanted the article to stay “fresh” I would suggest casually updating the body of the post every 3-6 months. Adding things like “Update: *Joe Schmo* has come up with 2 *alternative formulas for calculating a mortage*.” (Where the text in asterisks is accordingly linked.) This will give your page the “updated” boost in the search engines as well as provide some additional link-outs to other bloggers (which tend to get reciprocated creating a broader network which in turn leads to new content/ideas… such a win-win-win. You win, your readers win, and your fellow bloggers win. I would almost go so far as to say that approach is so good for everyone that it MAKES the other things bad practice. They are bad practice not because they are riddled with bad intention (like content re-hashing is), but because there are options that have greater benefit for everyone.)

Thanks for the follow up comment. I’m gonna subscribe to your feed now.

(P.S. Not to be nit-picky… but another uber-peeve I have that 3rd party Comment Systems fix: My previous comment now has a Text-link-ad in it. As the writer of the comment it bothers me to see my comment converted to an advertisement. Because things like Disqus are not loaded into the page content during the initial request to the server they are not “converted” by those text-link-ad plug-ins. hehehe. I am not going to come out of this unscathed, am I. I’m gonna go down in the annals of douglasskarr.com as a troll/complainer. lol. )

You put such an evil spin on it. By no means did I mean to infer being dishonest. Doshdosh is a great site with fantastic content, both new and old! I believe their ‘undated’ articles allow them to linger longer, though.

If I write an article on Excel formulas and it’s a great article, the problem is that the Search Engines find a ‘newer’ article and then push mine aside. People visit my site and see it’s a year old and they tend to look for something newer - even though my content may be better.

This is the reason why, if you pay attention to some of the top bloggers (using dates), they tend to regurgitate their content over and over. Fresh content keeps the search engine traffic coming - which allows you to grow your readership.

I absolutely agree with you, great content will always prevail. I’m just noting that you may be putting yourself at a disadvantage by ‘expiring’ content that is still worthy of attention!

Great comments, Matt!

So if I smudge out the expiration date on my carton of milk does it not spoil?

Please leave the dates alone (they look nice here anyway)… and let’s not encourage others to adopt this really bad practice. It’s bad for the users and eventually those who do it will be cast in a bad light.

Note to bloggers who make it this far: If you want continued traffic to your blog, keep writing great content. Don’t rely on you users to sustain your traffic… ish.

All around frightening vibes going on here, Doug. ]]>