Date in the URL

[Pherogab]

Hi,

I checked plenty of newspaper websites (example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/, http://www.nytimes.com/, http://www.lemonde.fr/) and all of them include the date in the url. (ie: http://www.nytimes.com/**2011/11/08/**business/global/italy-bonds-push-higher.html).

What's the point? Google said that this has no importance and those folders are not even real, you can't get all the articles from the NYT in november 2011 if you remove the rest of the URL.

If you use Schema.org properly and the google news sitemap is there still any use for this tactic?

[RyanKent]

I think you have all the information at hand. There is no secret message which you are missing. Some site owners see the value in presenting the URL in this manner, others do not. I personally do not use dates in the URL so I agree with you.

Keep in mind the dates in search results is a newer idea, and many newpaper sites like the ones you mentioned have been online for many years.

Another point is they likely did not design the URLs with search engines in mind. It usually is best not to think of search engines. People see URLs in their bookmarks, e-mails and various links. Even if you know dates appear in Google, there are other search engines.

Even if you mainly focus Google, you may wish to include the dates in URLs anyway as the dates do not always appear. Try searching for "Obama news". The top 3 results presently do not show any date. Even if you know the date appears in the description, a site owner may still wish to use the date in the URL. It is common for site owners to repeat information in the title and meta description and URL. Also the date is in a silver font which is less noticeable.

The bottom line, it's a preference of the site owner. There are many decisions to make related to the architecture of a website. Five different owners may offer five different URL structures for the same site. While my preference is to not use the dates in URLs, I can't fault a newspaper site for doing such.

[Pherogab]

Thanks Kent but I probably wasn't clear.

I took the example of removing the 11/08 to show that those folders are just an URL rewrite and don't really exist.

The date the article is published will show up in the SERP (type this query:

Interest Rates on Italian Bonds Pushed to New Levels) and I was wondering what was the point of having it in the URL too.

[RyanKent]

For many readers the date an article is published on a news site is a critical piece of information. Many readers only want information from a specific year, month or day. If that same URL from the NY times showed /2010/11/08 instead of /2011 many readers would instantly know they are not interested in the article.

This concept can apply to many articles. Think /2011/best-teams-in-football vs /2009/best-teams-in-football. Sports, elections, celebrities, headline news and so much more is all date dependent.