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You are correct - this is an attempt to appear fresh. But it is no excuse. It’s still an anti-user dark pattern.

Yep. It is an intention to appear fresh to Google, so that it can rank above websites that have better content but are using dates. Users be damned.

Fully agree. Also you can appear fresh regardless _if you are actually fresh_, simply by adding an review/update date.

Or if you’re not, just use a cron to keep the dates fresh

But... then what's the point of a date at all? May as well not have one.

I should have used /sarc

The idea was to fool people and bots into thinking it was fresh!

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