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
-
Best way to handle Breadcrumbs for Blog Posts in multiple categories?
The site in question uses Wordpress. They have a Resources section that is broken into two categories (A or B). Underneath each of these categories is 5 or 6 subcategories. The structure looks like this: /p/main-category-a/subcategory/blog-post-name /p/main-category-b/subcategory/blog-post-name All posts have a main category, but other posts often have multiple subcategories while some posts also fall into both main categories. What would be the easiest or most effective way to auto-populate the breadcrumb based on from where the person reached the blog post? So for example, a way to set Home -> Main Category -> Subcategory 1 as the breadcrumb if they reach it from the Subcategory 1 landing page. Or is this not possible and we should just set the breadcrumb manually based on where we feel it best lives? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Non Published Wordpress Pages
Hi, Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | aua1 -
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
Technical SEO | | IstoresincThe title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck
0 -
Changing menus regularly - will this impact SEO
We are working on an internal project, where the website owner is thinking of making regular changes to one or two items on the top level menu. Assuming they redirect the original pages or navigate to them in other ways, is there any other impact on SEO to changing the menu structure? I assume they'd submit new sitemaps after each change. Many thanks Fiona
Technical SEO | | fionah0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Multiple urls for posting multiple classified ads
Want to optimize referral traffic while at same time keep search engines happy and the ads posted. Have a client who advertises on several classified ad sites around the globe. Which is better (post Panda), having multiple identical urls using canonicals to redirect juice to original url? For example: www.bluewidgets.com is the original www.bluewidgetsusa.com www.blue-widgets-galore.com Or, should the duplicate pages be directed to original using a 301? Currently using duplicate urls. Am currently not using "nofollow" tags on those pages.
Technical SEO | | AllIsWell0