Recommendations on the URL Structure When Posting Blogs

[SEO5Team]

Sites are adopting different URL structures for posting blogs (examples below).

Quicksprout ( www.domain.com/dateposted/blogposttitle)

Moz (www.domain.com/blog/blogposttitle)

SEO Book (www.domain.com/blogposttitle)

What do you recommend?

[dynamyt100]

The solution is simple. Remember usability is key to the user experience. If you have a blog then place the blog/ in the URL. Think of an e-commerce website. You want to categorize items correctly. You don't want customers finding fridges in the microwaves category

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi again

Utilize the /blog/ in the URL. Otherwise, you're creating a flat architecture to your site. Always include /blog/ in your URL if it is in fact a blog piece of content.

[SEO5Team]

Thanks for your opinion Andrew. Wondering how much of an impact it makes if you dont utilize the "blog" in the URL structure and add in the Title directly (www.domain.com/title) especially when going after competitive keywords.Logically it would make more sense to have a structure like this (www.domain.com/blog/category/title)

[SEO5Team]

Good point Patrick.

[VTDesignWorks]

The first question to answer is if the site itself is a blog... or if it's a website that also has a blog. If it's the latter and the blog lives at www.yoursite.com/blog/, then the structure should obviously always include the /blog/.

Responding to your 3 examples in order:

Quicksprout's structure is a little odd in that their blog lives at /blog/, but the individual posts do not. A bit strange from both a human usability and bot crawling hierarchy standpoint. Other than that, including the date is helpful in terms of telling the user/bots how current the post is and differentiating it from similarly named posts on the same blog. That said, it pushes the title/topic keywords further out in the URL.

Moz uses /blog/, which again makes the most sense, but they've foregone including the date. This, however, lets them get the topic/title keywords to appear earlier in the URL.

SEO Book, like Quicksprout, oddly strips out the /blog/ directory from the URL. Other than that, their strategy is the same as Moz.

The winner here, in our opinion, seems to be Moz. The /blog/ remains when you're on individual posts which makes sense to both humans and bots. They don't include the date, but historically that's not been critical.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I have always been a fan of the /blog/blog-title lay out, but it's really up to you on how you want to structure your URL. The reason I like this structure is because if it's an older post, but still valid, then users won't automatically disregard it because of the date in the URL. But really, both ways have their benefits.

Here are some reasons:
Reasons to include dates Reasons not to include dates Dates in URLs Q+A
Hope this helps! Good luck!