Recommendations on the URL Structure When Posting Blogs
-
Sites are adopting different URL structures for posting blogs (examples below).
Quicksprout ( www.domain.com/dateposted/blogposttitle)
Moz (www.domain.com/blog/blogposttitle)
SEO Book (www.domain.com/blogposttitle)
What do you recommend?
-
The solution is simple. Remember usability is key to the user experience. If you have a blog then place the blog/ in the URL. Think of an e-commerce website. You want to categorize items correctly. You don't want customers finding fridges in the microwaves category
-
Hi again
Utilize the /blog/ in the URL. Otherwise, you're creating a flat architecture to your site. Always include /blog/ in your URL if it is in fact a blog piece of content.
-
Thanks for your opinion Andrew. Wondering how much of an impact it makes if you dont utilize the "blog" in the URL structure and add in the Title directly (www.domain.com/title) especially when going after competitive keywords.Logically it would make more sense to have a structure like this (www.domain.com/blog/category/title)
-
Good point Patrick.
-
The first question to answer is if the site itself is a blog... or if it's a website that also has a blog. If it's the latter and the blog lives at www.yoursite.com/blog/, then the structure should obviously always include the /blog/.
Responding to your 3 examples in order:
Quicksprout's structure is a little odd in that their blog lives at /blog/, but the individual posts do not. A bit strange from both a human usability and bot crawling hierarchy standpoint. Other than that, including the date is helpful in terms of telling the user/bots how current the post is and differentiating it from similarly named posts on the same blog. That said, it pushes the title/topic keywords further out in the URL.
Moz uses /blog/, which again makes the most sense, but they've foregone including the date. This, however, lets them get the topic/title keywords to appear earlier in the URL.
SEO Book, like Quicksprout, oddly strips out the /blog/ directory from the URL. Other than that, their strategy is the same as Moz.
The winner here, in our opinion, seems to be Moz. The /blog/ remains when you're on individual posts which makes sense to both humans and bots. They don't include the date, but historically that's not been critical.
-
Hi there
I have always been a fan of the /blog/blog-title lay out, but it's really up to you on how you want to structure your URL. The reason I like this structure is because if it's an older post, but still valid, then users won't automatically disregard it because of the date in the URL. But really, both ways have their benefits.
Here are some reasons:
Reasons to include dates Reasons not to include dates Dates in URLs Q+A
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Traffic to blog home page is going down after changing my WordPress Theme
I recently changed my wordpress theme from a standard free theme to a newer theme. The home page I switched up a bit adding more calls to action to some of our top posts and leading people to popular categories and so on. This greatly improved the usability of our site as it allowed us to highlight new posts. The previous free template simply listed 10 of our most recent posts on a page with small snippets and then you had to move to the next page to keep reading. Since switching my theme the blog traffic has stayed relatively level. That being said, the specific posts traffic is going up a lot whereas the organic traffic to the blog homepage is now nearly depleted. Is this a common thing to happen or is there anything I can do to fix this issue?
Content Development | | saultienut0 -
Find blog post idea
How do I find blog post ideas for my website blog when there are only very few questions people have. I am a tour operator operator and the the keywords I target are Provence bike tour, Normandy bike tour , Tuscany bike tour and so on. I am trying to to find blog ideas to create a topic cluster for those pillar pages. Any advice on how to find blog ideas that could boost my pillar pages. Thank you,
Content Development | | seoanalytics1 -
Blog Posts
I have a blog as part of my business website...when I make a blog post, should I ALWAYS include a link in that post back to another page on my website? So every blog post has a link back to the site..or should I be intermittent on backlinks? Just wondering what the best practice is to help the site's SEO...
Content Development | | sdwellers0 -
I started a Wordpress blog, google indexed it...
How long before I can see those links show up in SEO Moz for my website? What elements is SEO Moz looking for before they add the wordpress site to my linking domains report? Regards, Jeff
Content Development | | biggieshaws0 -
Is it OK to delete a blog from a blog site and post it somewhere else ?
I posted a blog on blogger 4/5 days back, though blog is good quality but site is useless and i want to remove it and put it some other site. Is it ok for Google ? I believe it might be indexed already
Content Development | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Old articles in a blog
Hi, I would like to know your opinion about old article obsolete in a blog. Do you think it's preferable to totally delete them from Wordpress CMS? Considering the fact that Panda update measures "Bouncing Rate", "Time on site", and all that? Thanks for your opinion and advice! (Sorry if my english is not perfect, 2nd language 😉 )
Content Development | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Site structure question
I'm doing a site that will have many many pages.
Content Development | | OxzenMedia
Now I have heard that you get more seo value if its a lower tear so for example: site.com/product rather than site.com/brand/subbrand/product Is this correct? Should I structure my site like this? site.com/product
site.com/brand points to site.com/product (so all products are on the sub root.) Does that make sense?0 -
Duplicating Articles/Blogs
Two years ago, some articles and blogs were written and submitted to certain tech and news sites relevant to our field. Will it be fine to submit those to other sites now. It is our content only and not some one else, but would it be penalty to submit the copy to other article sites whereever those articles/content are relevant today also?
Content Development | | sayeed0