Even though Copyright Year info is tiny and easy to overlook detail, but having a current one is a major sign of a well maintained website. The copyright year communicates the information about the freshness of website’s content to the visitors. So, it is a good practice to keep the website footer updated.

Copyright information establishes your ownership over the website’s content. Updating the year of copyright on your website may not be important legally, but it is a smart marketing strategy. You should have the most recent year displayed at the bottom of the website.

The Copyright Year on a website gives useful information about copyright on the content of website. The Website Copyright provides ownership to the content of website, and it is essential to reinstate the Copyright every year. Websites with updated Copyright year are not only considered well-maintained, but also get high SEO ranking. All website owners need to update the year of Copyright annually.

The Copyright is a year in which the site was created. A range of years indicate the publishing years when the content was revised. If your site has been up for more than one year then it is recommended to display the date range instead of the launched year. Showing the correct copyright year on the website gives an idea of the time period your website is in business.

There are three ways of updating copyright year on the website, they are:

Client Side Scripting  to Update Website Copyright

This means running the scripts on client machine to update the Copyright year. The client side scripting can be done with the help of JavaScript. The scripts query the current year on client machine. This updates copyright year while the web pages are being loaded. Here’s JavaScript code you can customize:

Copyright &copy; <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">document.write((new Date()).getFullYear());</script> My Company Name, All Rights Reserved.

This is what you will see

Or

Copyright &copy; 2006 - <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">document.write((new Date()).getFullYear());</script> My Company Name, All Rights Reserved.

This is what you will see

The scripting will refresh the copyright year browser-side, depending on the time settings made by the programmer. Updating copyright year with the scripts would be a smart thing to do for any website. Since it is such a small thing that many developer may forget to update it manually every year. On a website, a script can smartly handle copyright year update.

Of course, it could be possible that the website owner forget to update the Copyright Year. That happens often, especially when you have hard-coded strings. In order to future-proof your copyright footer, it is wise to just let code handle this task.

Static Website Copyright Date Rewriting

This means manually updating the Copyright Year on multiple web pages using web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. The tool lets you search and replace the old year with the current year.

Server-Side Scripting for Website Copyright update

This means getting your Copyright Year updated dynamically every year with the help of server side coding. A server side program can automatically update the Copyright year. The code can be written in any server side language such as JavaScript, Perl, Ruby On Rails, ASP or PHP.

Updating Copyright Year feels tedious and monotonous task? Well, if so then it’s time to opt for the automatic copyright update.