Will Adding Publish Date at end of Page Title for Blog posts Hurt SEO?
-
I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO?
The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content
-
Having a date in the URL is effective so long as the SEO friendly structure takes place before the date exactly how you mentioned "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15". If you change the order you run the risk of priority keywords being ignored "/**01-11-15-**dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge" . Also try to keep the URL short as the browser and Google will truncate the URL if it is too long which will defeat the purpose of it being visible for users. Will it hurt your SEO? ... no way, so long as you are not updating the URL when you update the page.
On a second note, the same does not apply for your titles as this is valuable real estate for primary keywords.
IDEAL : Your Primary Key Phrase | Your Secondary Key Phrase | Your Tertiary Key Phrase
IF YOU HAVE TO: Your Primary Key Phrase | Your Secondary Key Phrase - Your Company Name **NEVER : **Your Primary Key Phrase | Your Secondary Key Phrase - **01-11-15 **Reason: The main reason we do not add it to the end of the title is because that space should be used for Keywords that best describe your page only. Even when it comes to you brand, I would rather replace the company name with a keyword if I can as Google in most cases already knows who you are.
-
Will not hurt at all...other than let the reader know the date you published same...first date that is, not a subsequent update date....fyi...
-
No, because search engines look for the last time that page file has been updated, not any recorded dates. I find it's pretty helpful, especially on blogs, to leave the date for users so they can evaluate if the information is relevant or the context of when you posted it.
-
Having dates in the URLs would discourage people from clicking on older posts in the SERPs, so you would be skewing your old posts vs new posts comparison in favor of new posts. Also, evergreen content can be really great for a site but those would be hard to come by with dates in the URLs I think, even if they are still very relevant.
However, there are certainly plenty of sites, like many Wordpress sites, that have dates in the URLs automatically so there are definitely people who successfully do this.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does using cufon for H-tags etc hurt SEO?
Does the use of cufon for H-tags et al affect SEO/how Google views your website?
Technical SEO | | Alligator0 -
Will getting backlinks to landing page from low quality sites negatively affect SEO?
I've recently started an initiative at my company to get our customers to publish a blog post about our company and to include a link to a landing page which sits on a subdomain attached to our main domain. The reason for directing visitors to the post to a landing page is to help with conversion. I've recently been thinking that couldn't the backlinks to this landing page from our customers' blogs (generally small sites) have a negative impact on the overall SEO of my companies domain? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JustinButlion0 -
Blog posts outranked for Title a String searches in content...why?
Site Pages: When I wrap a page title, or a string of several words in quotes, and GG search, my client's page shows up first. My understanding is that this shows general health of site, and acknowledgement as the original source of the content. Blog Posts: When I wrap a blog page, or post, title or string of words in quotes, and GG search, Feedblitz, Facebook, and other scraper sites appear before the blog home page, and also the actual blog post. The blog is in a separate directory. Does this suggest that the /blog/ is being penalized or demoted in any way? Does it indicate the /blog/ directory does not have authority? Both the static site pages, and the blog pages, are using rel=canonical tags. What causes this, what does it indicate, and how can I fix it? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seagreen
Greg0 -
Do I need to do on-page SEO for my mobile site?
We have a desktop site, and we just built our first mobile site. Right now, the mobile site doesn't have any title tags, meta descriptions or anything like that, but do I need to even do that? If I have all of that on the desktop site, and the mobile site is just redirected from the desktop site, can't I just do it on the desktop site only? Is there anything to gain from doing it for both sites?
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Change in url structure - added category page
I have recently started an e-commerce website and have now changed the url structure and added another level to my category pages. So where it before was www.website.com/shirts it is now www.website.com/clothes/shirts. So I added the clothes category (just an example) before the shirt category and am now finding that the old url is still found in the search index and is still live on my site. How could this be? I use wordpress and simply change the urls in the backend. The products are still under www.website.com/product/blue-shirt-123 so they won't be affected but I suppose it now means I have duplicate category pages? So my question is: Should I 301 the the old category page (www.website.com/shirts)to the new url (www.website.com/clothes/shirts). And how can the old url still be live on my site? If this was a bit unclear, please let me know. Appreciate your replies!
Technical SEO | | bitte0 -
Will one line of duplicate content drag down my landing page?
I am using copyscape to check for duplicate content on my landing pages. I found three sites that have the exact same sentence as mine, on a page that I rank well for on one of two key terms related to the product. The sentence is not essential to my product page. Do I risk losing page one rank on a key search term when I remove that sentence on my site, in hopes of possibly improving the page on the second key search term? Do I leave it alone? This is an older "template" site with very little that I can do SEO-wise, and I have managed to get a few key prodcut landing pages on page one of Google. It has seen a drop in rank on many landing pages post-panda, and I'm doing my best to clean up what I can. Do I leave well enough alone for a page one rank on one term, or swap out that sentence in hopes of getting better rank on two keywords?
Technical SEO | | Ticket_King0 -
Putting blog excerpts in footer of every page?
I have roughly 150 non-blog pages and 500 articles in my blog. The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500. The posts in the footer of each page change with every page refresh. So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts. One of my objectives is to drive visitors to some older blog content that has become buried deep in the archives over the years. Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique? Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog). Thoughts or comments?
Technical SEO | | ahirai0 -
Duplicate Page Title
First i had a problem with duplicate title errors, almost every page i had was double because my website linked to both www.funky-lama.com and funky-lama.com I changed this by adding a code to htaccess to redirect everything to www.funky-lama.com, but now my website was crawled again and the errors were actually doubled. all my pages now have duplicate title errors cause of pages like this www.funky-lama.com/160-confetti-gitaar.html funky-lama.com/160-confetti-gitaar.html www.funky-lama.com/1_present-time funky-lama.com/1_present-time
Technical SEO | | funkylama0