Posting Future Posts in the Past

Stephan Miller on the originally named StephanMiller.com recently confessed to having posted an article or two directly into his blog archive with a historical date rather than letting it slip into the usual chronological flow of posts. His rationale was that he has several unfinished pieces that don’t quite fit the current themes of his blog but would be useful to some readers nevertheless.

I think it’s a reasonable approach to take in most circumstances if you have great content that doesn’t slot into current topics, then why not? It will help you gain a footing in the search engines for those topics that may not fascinate your present readership but will be interesting to others. And, you never know, those readers who arrive via the search engines, learn something from those apparently older posts, may just subscribe and play catch up with your newer writing.

It might be a good idea to label a post as having been backdated in this way, especially if you’re making any kind of time-sensitive claims in it. I would not want to see a post purportedly from last Tuesday that announced this week’s lottery numbers, for instance, that would just look like cheating.

In fact, I might even go so far as to create a new standalone category for such posts, make no bones about them being new and yet old, especially if they were in draft form at some time in the past and you’re simply playing catch up with your own work. Perhaps call them Bonus Backdates or a similar name.

One thing to watch out for, however, is that depending on how your RSS newsfeed is set up, these backdated posts may nevertheless appear as new posts in your feed. This could potentially confuse regular subscribers and may defeat the object of uploading posts in the past in this way.