I was wondering if it would be possible to add the date the tutorials were created. I really appreciate the tutorials on this site, but sometimes it is not clear if a tutorial can still be considered valid in general or only valid for certain situations. If we talk about software version or Linux etc... it is easy to tell if the tutorial is what we need, but if we talk generically sometimes it is not so easy. However, old tutorials are also useful, maybe not altogether, but it can give us insights into some details that are still valid. I realize that maybe some people seeing the date too old would not even open them, however among us site managers we know that it is impossible to make things that apply to everyone.
New tutorials do have the publish date. I agree that it is useful to know the publish or latest revision date. It would be nice to have this added to old tutorials, too.
Oh, you're right. I didn't realize, I found a tutorial that I was interested in and I wanted to see if it's current but it didn't have the date. Probably, after reading what you wrote, it was older. Thanks for the explanation.
Dates do not really matter for tutorials as tutorials are mostly for specific OS versions or software versions and these are mentioned das title of the tutorial or in the first chapter. And if no OS version or software version is mentioned, then the tutorial can still be applied as it is to current OS versions. So if a Tutorial, e.g., mentions how to install XYZ on Ubuntu 20.04, this tutorial is for Ubuntu 20.04 only, not Ubuntu 18.04 or 22.04 or 24.04, just 20.04; it will work on this OS version in the same way on that date it was written and also 20 years later. That's not necessarily the case, dates get removed after a few months as Google penalizes tutorials with dates as soon as they are older than a few months. Due to Google penalizing this, we would then have to charge users for the content, so tutorials will not be available for free anymore. Or we would have to show fake dates that get automatically updated several times a year, as other sites do. We always tried the legit route, but if users demand to see dates, we can add such automatically updated dates as others do. But I do not like that. And you still won't know when the content was created, but you will see some date. But as mentioned above, dates do not matter for tutorials anyway, the only thing that matters is for which OS version it has been written.
Personally, over time I have learned to give a damn about Google for several reasons. First because it often changes the game, so you adapt to some of their “requests” and then after a while they change it again. Second because they will always give benefits to the payer anyway, not just in obvious sponsored ads. Third because in the end if 200 sites copy-paste content and you instead have original and useful, well-written things they are bound to index you, or rather their bots index you. But this is just my opinion and my way of working with search engines, I don't demand that others do the same. Everyone has to do as they see fit. I, just out of a collaborative spirit, pointed out what I thought was useful. This is one of the sites I've found most useful over the years even though I haven't participated much One solution might also be to make the date visible only to registered users. I agree (I had also written it) that with the versions of the software or O.S. you can also tell the period when the tutorial is written or otherwise if it is useful to us. If I have a server with an old system but which I don't update for various reasons it helps me a lot to still find the right tutorial. However, if you read this tutorial (https://www.howtoforge.com/debian_dns) without knowing when it was written what do you think?
That's crazy. Just leads to updating the date every few months, which then is wrong info. It would be more useful to have accurate date on article. Well, google has its own ideas. Luckily I try for a few years already to use google services as little as possible.
We feel the same way. And we should also add that the sites that go after these tricks to get indexed are the least interesting ones, which copy and paste and do not create serious content.
Yes, this might be a viable option indeed. This guide is quite old, but at first glance, I would say everything mentioned there should still work. The problem today is that we publish genuine new guides here at howtoforge, with no AI and paid sysadmins doing the setups and testing them, and then many other sites start copying them; in the past years, they used text spinners to rewrite them automatically, today, they use AI. Google is not able (or more likely not willing) to keep track of how published things are first, even if the copy sites use our exact screenshots or they copy the text without modification, and Google still ranks them.
I understand very well what you write. Today the visible internet is almost worse than the deep web, there are people who would like to earn (a lot) from other people's work. I have a site that has been closed but visible for a decade waiting for a major renovation that I am about to finish (I do other things to eat). But what I wanted to tell you is that one day I found myself with a hundred legitimate readers and about a thousand bots... with the site closed and topics from more than a decade ago ?!?! Okay they are evergreen topics as opposed to IT but more than a thousand bots? Unfortunately, there is no way to block copy and paste, even javascripts are easily circumvented and are more annoying to human readers. Perhaps the only nice trick, but I don't know how effective with modern IA, could be in the article taking some keywords and rewriting them as an image maybe using php's GDs automatically just selecting the right words to make the article unserviceable. Then probably some Indian child would be put back to hard labor for copying etc.... or maybe they would copy the article with the words written in image... A new type of captcha will come out in a while, it will be used by AIs to prove they are a bot and prevent humans from submitting the form.
