Blog article URL - with or without date?
-
Quick question to all you folks: does including the date in a blog article's permalink affect rankings? For example, here's an article with the month and year, as well as the blog title: http://www.ayzanyc.com/blog/2012/12/difference-between-hot-chocolate-hot-cocoa/
Is it better to omit the date and just put the blog title?
Also, if is better to avoid using the date, is it worth it to change the link structure of our previous articles (given that the URL will now be different), or should we just focus on future articles?
Thanks ahead of time for your advice.
-
@Paul "I always include the publish date in the post itself because little frustrates me more than not being able to tell whether an article's recommendations are current or not."
WORD
-
Just wanted to chime in and agree with the suggestion of leaving the post publish date within the post content. That is also a source of frustration for me!
-
I'm with David that the dates in the URL structure aren't really beneficial and could actually be harmful unless you're a news site of some sort.
I always include the publish date in the post itself because little frustrates me more than not being able to tell whether an article's recommendations are current or not, but don't see any reason to emphasise the date in the URL.
According to top WordPress SEO Joost deValk, the presence of the dates in URLs can hurt clickthrough rates from the SERPs as well.
Because you're on WordPress, it would be quite difficult to change URLs only for new posts .Because it's templated, making the URL structure change is going to affect all posts. Which means it's imperative that you implement a redirect for all the old posts when you update to the new URLs.
Fortunately, this is a snap to do as Yoast has written a little web-app to help you create the redirect automatically without needing to know anything about the code.
He's written a post about the why's which further answer your question, and includes a link to the tool he built to create the necessary redirect. http://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
It depends on the type of content you are writing. For say, if you are covering news articles, it would be better if you mention the date in the URL: as also in the article, somewhere.
But if the articles are basically ever green content, you should be better off with dates.
-
Personally, I would omit the date. It unnecessarily lengthens / add folder structure to the URLs.
I also prefer removing the trailing slash at the end of the URL.
It's your call whether or not you change the existing URLs, be mindful to implement a 301 redirect if you go down that route.
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
-
Appending a code at the end of a URL
Hi All, Some real estate/ news companies have a code appended to the end of a URL https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-qld-ormiston-141747584 https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/childcare-centre-could-face-prosecution-for-leaving-child-on-hot-bus-20230320-p5ctqs.html Can I ask if there's any negative SEO implications for doing this? Cheers Dave
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Website blog is hacked. Whats the best practice to remove bad urls
Hello So our site was hacked which created a few thousand spam URLs on our domain. We fixed the issue and changed all the spam urls now return 404. Google index shows a couple of thousand bad URLs. My question is- What's the fastest way to remove the URLs from google index. I created a site map with sof the bad urls and submitted to Google. I am hoping google will index them as they are in the sitemap and remove from the index, as they return 404. Any tools to get a full list of google index? ( search console downloads are limited to 1000 urls). A Moz site crawl gives larger list which includes URLs not in Google index too. Looking for a tool that can download results from a site: search. Any way to remove the URLs from the index in bulk? Removing them one by one will take forever. Any help or insight would be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | ajiabs1 -
URL Indexed But Not Submitted to Sitemap
Hi guys, In Google's webmaster tool it says that the URL has been indexed but not submitted to the sitemap. Is it necessary that the URL be submitted to the sitemap if it has already been indexed? Appreciate your help with this. Mark
Technical SEO | | marktheshark100 -
Canonical URL Change
Hi, I have a Product Page, say www.example.com/product-title/.
Technical SEO | | viatrading1
Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title/ I want to change its URL to www.example.com/product-title-2/
Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title-2/
Can't do 301 Redirect. Is SEO Juice passed from www.example.com/product-title/ to www.example.com/product-title-2/ ? Thanks,0 -
Canonical URLs in an eCommerce site
We have a website with 4 product categories (1. ice cream parlors, 2. frozen yogurt shops etc.). A few sub-categories (e.g. toppings, smoothies etc.) and the products contained in those are available in more than one product category (e.g. the smoothies are available in the "ice cream parlors" category, but also in the "frozen yogurt shops" category). My question: Unfortunately the website has been designed in a way that if a subcategory (e.g. smoothies) is available in more than 1 category, then itself (the subcategory page) + all its product pages will be automatically visible under various different urls. So now I have several urls for one and the same product: www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|FROZEN-YOGURT-SHOPS-391-2-5 and http://www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|ICE-CREAM-PARLORS-391-1-5 And also several ones for one and the same sub-category (they all include exactly the same set of products): http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-1-12-0-4 (the smoothies contained in the ice cream parlors category) http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-2-12-0-4 (the same smoothies, contained in the frozen yogurt shops category) This is happening with around 100 pages. I would add canonical tags to the duplicates, but I'm afraid that by doing so, the category (frozen yogurt shops) that contains several non-canonical sub-categories (smoothies, toppings etc.) , might not show up anymore in search results or become irrelevant for Google when searching for example for "products for frozen yoghurt shops". Do you know if this would be actually the case? I hope I explained it well..
Technical SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Should I change by URL's
I started with a static website and then moved to Wordpress. At the time I had a few hundred pages and wanted to keep the same URL structure so I use a plugin that adds .html to every page. Should I change the structure to a more common URL structure and do 301 directs from the .html page to the regular page?
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Blogger Blog URL Structure Questions
I'm starting to use my blog more and wanted to ask about an issue I've read about on SEOmoz in the past. I use blogger instead of wordpress. It's quick and simple - I have no interest in switching to wordpress for this particular blog. My blog is currently setup as blog.site.com. Is it still important (for seo reasons) to switch from blog.site.com to site.com/blog? If so, is there a way to do this in blogger? And if I do this, will my past posts lose their authority if their redirected to the new url structure? Rand mentions in this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls "never use multiple subdomains" - This is an old article, but I've seen this mentioned several times. Does this still hold true? Am I losing out on links to my blog? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Advice on promoting a blog
Hi i am working on a new blog and would like to know if there are any sites where i can publish part of the new blog to gain traffic to my main blog. What i am looking at is, to publish part of a news story and then have people come to my main site after reading some of the new story. I have come across accidentally a couple over a year ago but cannot locate them now. I want people to be able to come to my site and read the whole story and then hopefully tell their friends. Also can anyone recommend decent social bookmarking sites that have a do follow on them to promote my blog please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860