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.
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
-
Schema for blogs
When I run a wordpress blog through the structured data testing tool I see that there is @type hentry. Is this enough for blogs etc? Is this a result of Wordpress adding in this markup? Do you recommend adding @blogposting type and if so why? What benefit to add a specific type of schema? How does it help in blogging? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al4 -
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!!!
Technical SEO | | Rich-DC1 -
Unpublish and republish old articles
This might be a dumb question but we had an incident where a new SEO guy thought it would be a good idea to un-publish and republish all of your 200+ blog posts which we carefully scheduled over the last 6 months. He did not update the content and did not change anything. His intention was to send out google a sign to recheck the sites or something. Now, the entire blog looks like it wen't live in one day, which I don't think is good? Should we load a backup and get our old publishing dates back, should we keep it with the new publishing dates? What are the consequences? Will it effect our SEO?
Technical SEO | | Funlocity1 -
Some Old date showing in SERP
I see some old date Jan 21 2013 showing up for some categories in Google search results. These are category pages and I do not see the date in view source. This is not a wordpress site or a blog page. We keep changing this page by removing/adding items so it is not outdated.
Technical SEO | | rbai0 -
Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input. A couple examples are: www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site. Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
Technical SEO | | Jom0 -
Google News URL Format
Hi, We are currently redesigning our gaming website (www.totallygn.com) and one of our main goals is to get listed by Google News in future. Looking at the Google News URL requirements "The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits." How does the above affect SEO structure? I was planning on using a format such as www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review how would this compare to something like? www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review234 Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | WalesDragon0 -
Ok to Put a Decimal in a URL?
I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement. For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like: http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?
Technical SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Drupal URL Aliases vs 301 Redirects + Do URL Aliases create duplicates?
Hi all! I have just begun work on a Drupal site which heavily uses the URL Aliases feature. I fear that it is creating duplicate links. For example:: we have http://www.URL.com/index.php and http://www.URL.com/ In addition we are about to switch a lot of links and want to keep the search engine benefit. Am I right in thinking URL aliases change the URL, while leaving the old URL live and without creating search engine friendly redirects such as 301s? Thanks for any help! Christian
Technical SEO | | ChristianMKTG0