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
-
Static Links in Sidebar Hurting SEO?
Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain). In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are: 6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
Technical SEO | | DemiGR
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website). So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page. Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static? Thanks!0 -
Create Page Titles from H1 using Yoast?
I'm working on a site that has 280 blog posts that have either been migrated from an old CMS site or created on the Dev version of the new WordPress site. We've written 280 unique meta descriptions so they don't truncate but it there a quick way I can export the current H1s and then import them into Yoast so they are set as the Page Titles? I've written unique Page Titles and meta descriptions for all the Service and Products page and just want a way to speed up the blog posts as their H1s are really good and what I would use as Page Titles anyway. Any help, greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Will removing the trailing slash impact my SEO?
Hi there, We have a company website based on Wordpress. I just noticed that under Settings > Permalinks I can configure the look of the URLs and even remove the trailing slash. We have about 2-300 pages online. If I remove the trailing slash now, will that negatively impact our SEO in anyway for existing pages? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Amr-Haffar0 -
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
Should each new blog post be added to Sitemap.xml
Hello everyone, I have a website that has only static content. I have recently added a Blog to my website and I am wondering if I need to add each new Blog post to my Sitemap.xml file? Or is there another way/better way to get the Blog posting index? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0 -
Adding 'NoIndex Meta' to Prestashop Module & Search pages.
Hi Looking for a fix for the PrestaShop platform Look for the definitive answer on how to best stop the indexing of PrestaShop modules such as "send to a friend", "Best Sellers" and site search pages. We want to be able to add a meta noindex ()to pages ending in: /search?tag=ball&p=15 or /modules/sendtoafriend/sendtoafriend-form.php We already have in the robot text: Disallow: /search.php
Technical SEO | | reallyitsme
Disallow: /modules/ (Google seems to ignore these) But as a further tool we would like to incude the noindex to all these pages too to stop duplicated pages. I assume this needs to be in either the head.tpl or the .php file of each PrestaShop module.? Or is there a general site wide code fix to put in the metadata to apply' Noindex Meta' to certain files. Current meta code here: Please reply with where to add code and what the code should be. Thanks in advance.0 -
Blog post summary pages
I'm wondering post-panda if its wise to block access to blog post summary pages like this one: http://www.howtotradestocks.org/blog/page/15/ Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | PeterM220