Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Will properly encoded & signs hurt or help me?
Hello friends, Will properly encoding a url hurt my ranking after having it improperly coded? I want to change my & symbols to & If I go from:
Technical SEO | | sonic22
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool To:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool Will I get hurt if I make the leap?0 -
SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | smmour2 -
Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages
Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now. Thank you,
Regards,
Armands0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Use of title tags on divs for SEO purposes
Hello community, I recently was asked by a client to analyze a website of a competitor. I did was he asked me to do but when I looked at the source code of the website I found this code: I changed the exact words into something for privacy reasons, but I never looked at a code like this.
Technical SEO | | JarnoNijzing
Using a div for an anchor I get but adding a title tag to the div? I never seen that before. Title tags on anchors, yes, using images in divs as background and then adding a title??? Does anyone have any experience with a code like this and if you do how does this impact rankings? Does it impact rankings at all and does anybody know of any correlation between the two? Looking forward for your responses. Regards Jarno0 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
Does posting an article on multiple sites hurt seo?
A client of mine creates thought leadership articles and pitches multiple sites to host the article on their site to reach different audiences. The sites that pick it up are places such as AdAge and MarketingProfs and we do get link juice from these sources most of the time. Does having the same article on these sites as well as your own hurt your SEO efforts in any way? Could it be recognized as duplicate content? I know the links are great just wondering if there is any other side effects especially when there are no links provided! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0