I’m an old (yep old) database programmer. One thing about all of us that predate (pun intended) the “millennium bug”, we want dates. We want those dates in a complete form. Meaning, two digits for the month, two digits for the day and four digits for the year.

I put dates in all my blog posts and see to it the publish date is a part of our blogs.

Dates are important

We are always hearing about how things never disappear from the internet. Therefore, it is important that we are able to put a time stamp on what we write. If I refer to “last Thursday” I follow it with the date. Same thing if I refer to last month. I don’t want the reader having to look up the date on the post and then figure out when last month was from when the post was written.

Even at that I’ve had people read and old post and comment on it like I had just written the post that day. Of course the information is out of date. I wrote it two years ago.

Don’t Over Look Dates when you are just starting to blog

If RE blogging is something you figure you will do for a couple of months since you have the time on your hands and you want to see what all the talk is about, or you want to say “Yeah, I’ve got a blog” then dates might not be important to you.

I know when I started blogging I figured I would be at this for a very long time. I wanted to make sure the material was dated, in case by the time someone read it, it was dated (if that makes sense).

Therefore, it is a good practice to get into right from the beginning to be putting dates on your material.

Realtors Provide the Best Examples of What NOT to Do

The March/April 2008 edition of our local realtor magazine arrived the other day. Inside I found an article on e-mail and web site marketing. At the bottom of the article it said: “Reprinted from REALTOR(copyright thingy here) Magazine Online”

Good enough, so I read:

11 Tips for a Great Web Site.

Tip #3 “Post your Web site at mulitple domain names like www.yourtownhomes.com, www.yourtownrealestate.com, www.yourname.com”

Tip #4 “Trade links with other real estate professionals, general business sites in your area, and your town’s main home page; consider testing an ad on the site”

Tip #9 “Put your name, your brokerage company, and your e-mail address on every page of your Web site.”

I looked at this advise in disbelief. I checked the date on the cover of the magazine April/May 2008. I just shook my head.

Well this afternoon, I’m writing this in Saturday March 29, 2008, after upgrading the lab to WordPress 2.5 I went searching for the original article in the REALTOR(copyright thingy here) Magazine. I found it, it doesn’t have a date on when it was written or published. It does start with the following paragraph.

“The 2003 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS ® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that 65 percent of homebuyers used the Internet to search for a home. Here are 11 tips to help you attract those buyers to your site:”

BTW (That number was 84% used the internet to search for homes in 2007)

I know there was a profile done in 2003, but I don’t know if these 11 tips were written back in 2003 or if they reference a 2003 study and were written in 2008.

If they were written in 2008 the author has probably been in a cryogenic stasis chamber for the past 5 years.

Granted it is much easier to allow agents to read these publications and follow this excellent advice. It certainly will keep them from getting anywhere near page 1 of Google or anywhere else for that matter.

It will:

• Get them flagged for Duplicate content
• Get them flagged for Link Exchange (link farming)
• And get them on a lot of spam email lists for publishing their email address (ON EVERY WEB PAGE)

But other than that, I guess the advise is OK!