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
-
Will subpages performance affects the overall SEO performance of the entire site?
I have site issues on certain subpages which I am not focusing for SEO, e.g. "News". I was wondering does the issues of these subpages affect my overall SEO performance (those pages which I will like it to be rank, e.g. "Products" page)?
Technical SEO | | erica.lee0 -
Will my site get devalued if I add the same company schema to all the pages of my website?
If I add the exact same schema markup to every page on my website - is it considered duplicate content? Our CMS is telling me that if I want schema mark-up on our site that it has to be the same on every page on the website. This limitation is frustrating but I am trying to figure out the best way to work within their boundaries. Your help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Annette_Wetzel0 -
Dates in the blog posts - on, off or regularly updated
Hello Moz community, We have a blog where we post what we believe is very valuable, unique content for our niche. The content frequently stays very relevant for our visitor for many many years. In terms of both user engagement and SEO, should we keep the dates in our blog posts? Should we remove them? Should we go through every blog post and edit it slightly every week even if there is no meaningful information we can add? Should employ some kind of plugin that does update the blog post date automatically?
Technical SEO | | SirMax0 -
Will presentational HTML tags actually be having a negative SEO effect?
Hi All, I have been using some scanning tools as usual and I keep getting notified about presentational HTML. I'm not involved in the web design but if this is actually having a negative effect then we need to get it changed. Can anyone advise? "pages of this website were found to use presentational HTML elements and/or attributes. It is widely regarded that use of presentational HTML like and should be avoided."
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rignite0 -
The word 'shop' in a page title
I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex. Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.' Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Rel = Canonical in Blog Posting
Hello, I keep coming back to rel=canonical issues! I noticed when I "view pagesource" that my drupal blog posting automatically creates link rel="canonical" href="/sample-blog-title" /< pattern (with the > reversed) in the source code. I'm getting a lot of Rel=Canonical warnings and double content warnings from Seomoz so I've been trying to insert link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"< but the page won't retain the code for some reason. I'm entering the code in Plain Text, but saving the document as Full HTML. Is there a better piece of code I can put in to demonstrate that the original blog page is the original source? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Significance of Page speed to SEO?
I am in the middle of optimizing sites for SEO, and am wondering how big of a factor it is to get page load speed under 1.5 seconds? I am prioritizing tasks and I want to know how much this could affect trafiic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell1