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.
Date in permalinks. Bad?
-
Hello!
I have a recipe website with over 1000 posts. Currently I have the month and year in the permalink that everyone is hinting off to me is bad. On the same front people tell me if I change the permalinks to just the post name it's going to significantly slow down my site.
I'm torn on this one about changing. From Google's standpoint is it better to change to the post name and if so should I be fearing I'm going to run into trouble with the change?
Any suggestions you have would be appreciated.
Thanks!!!
-
I'm assuming the permalink is the domain.com/blog/year/month/date/postname type structure, the Wordpress default? Going from so many unnecessary folders to fewer seems like it can only speed things up a bit.
I'd recommend a structure such as domain.com/recipes/�tegory%/%postname%/ if you have them categorized by types of meal. Google likes to see a logical folder structure. Makes for solid human readability as well.
And don't forget to redirect old permalinks to new permalinks. If there are any posts linked out there, you'll want to be sure they redirect to the new permalink.
-
Thank you for this info. I've been going back on forth in removing the dates probably for at least a year now. Always concerned about performance but I know that leaving the dates in there is just bad. We're going to give it a shot and see what happens. People keep telling me with as many posts that I have the concern is performance but maybe this is just bad info. Thanks!
-
The problem is that it dates your posts, so your click-through & time on page could be negatively impacted if the audience believes it's outdated information.
My advice is to make the change and check the performance speed after. I believe that Wordpress has addressed this issue anyway with this update. If you are worried you can add a post ID to the post name tag, but I personally wouldn't be worried about it. If performance is truly that bad you can always go back.
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
-
The W3C Markup Validation Service - Good, Bad or Impartial?
Hi guys, it seems that now days it is almost impossible to achieve 0 (Zero) Errors when testing a site via (The W3C Markup Validation Service - https://validator.w3.org). With analytic codes, pixels and all kind of tracking and social media scripts gunning it seems to be an unachievable task. My questions to you fellow SEO'rs out there are 2: 1. How important and to what degree of effort do you go when you technically review a site and make the decision as to what needs to be fixed and what you shouldn't bother with. 2. How do you argue your corner when explaining to your clients that its impossible to active 100% validation. *As a note i will say that i mostly refer to Wordpress driven sites. would love ot hear your take. Daniel.
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Website credits for designers - good or bad
Hi My core service is web design and development. I often place a credit on my clients websites pointing them back to my web design or web development pages. Is this a wise practice with penguin and panda updates? Would this also pull my ranking down?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Are 404 Errors a bad thing?
Good Morning... I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts... I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing. The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google. Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page... In this case, are 404 pages bad? You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled. Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
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.
Technical SEO | | onurkiyak0 -
Is Google caching date same as crawling/indexing date?
If a site is cached on say 9 oct 2012 doesn't that also mean that Google crawled it on same date ? And indexed it on same date?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?
Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
Is it bad (black hat) to have an H1 text as a text indent?
Is it bad practice to use a text indent through CSS for H1 text on a homepage(basically hiding h1 text)? I'm just trying to compensate for the fact that some text that should really be in the h1 tag is actually an image.
Technical SEO | | inc.com1 -
Is link cloaking bad?
I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites. In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links. Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0