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Greetings! Two questions on blog post best practices
Good day!
I have a personal blog I seek to monetize. Two questions for the Collective on best practices for blog posts:
1. Should the original publication date of a post appear along with the “update” date? I was told in a Google forum by a Googlr developer yes, that it goes to credibility, and my web developer says no, it makes it seem like “old news”. (These are “evergreen” stories)
2. Can blog posts feature a section at the bottom for “External Links” that display the links via anchor text (and do not display raw urls)? My developer tells me this is terrible for seo, but I see other sites do it. Are there best practices for commercial sites that are not appropriate for personal blogs?Look forward to your input! Many thanks!
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1 Reply
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Update date format:
<lastmod>
Yes, you can and should include the original published date. Age from this isn’t critical – especially not as critical as Google’s index date, from which age is determined.
Internal links and External links should have text – raw URL’s can be long and ugly. Links should have context and be in the body more so. External links (esp without “nofollow) will send authority to other pages and that authority will decrease (in slightly ascending order) with each link placed (i.e. outbound link 5 will have less than 20% of ougoing, relevent authority).
Hope that helps
The Primary Position SEO team.
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I’ve done seo for 21 years and I’ve never bothered to date blog posts.
Also I use a mix of contextual links and a few raw (short) urls and still get blog content ranked on Google in top 5 organic results so do whatever you’re comfortable with.
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