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

If you are talking about creating authorship linking specifically (i.e. using rel=author markup) you can't do that using a brand, Mark. Google won't let you. Authorship can only be connected to a personal Google+ profile. Which makes sense when you think about it. A "brand" can't write an article. Only a person can.

Forget about trying to create a personal profile that is actually the brand name. Google is very specific that personal profiles must be real people, and quite regularly removes accounts that don't meet the criteria.

If you do want to connect your content to a brand, you'll need to use the rel=publisher markup instead, connected to a Google+ business page Unfortunately at this point that "publisher" connection doesn't yet lead to any kind of rich snippet advantage in the SERP (eg. an image next to the search result as in rel=author).

There is talk that Google will eventually start using a brand image or logo in SERPS associated with rel=publisher but it's anybody's guess exactly when, or if, this will actually occur.

As for creating a fake persona to represent all the contributors of content - since this is diametrically opposed to what rel=author is supposed to represent, I have to assume Google has (or will devise) methods for detecting that kind of manipulation and devaluing or penalising it.

The whole point of authorship is that is supposed to allow creation of a trust relationship with the writing of a particular person. If there's anything we've learned this year from all the algorithm updates, it's that trying to manipulate legitimate ranking/authority signals purely for marketing purposes is a fool's errand. You may get away with it for a while, but when it gets clobbered, all the effort you put into the manipulation will have been wasted. Or worse yet will get you penalised. Trying to represent the work of several writers under one "stage name" is just such a manipulation.

Best suggestion at this point? Use rel=publisher markup for "brand" content (like product descriptions etc) and connect individual authors' content (like how-to articles, blog posts etc) to each individual's personal G+ profile.

In other words - use the tool as it was intended, instead of trying to pervert it purely for marketing benefit.

Paul

You can certainly edit an existing 301 redirect to point to a new location, Zora. Obviously you want to do this as little as possible, but there's nothing against doing it to to fix the otherwise ridiculously long redirect chain.

The "permanent" part of a 301 is the fact that it tells the search engine to consider that the original URL's page will never be needed again and only keep track of the new URL. Whereas a 302 temporary redirect says "the original page will be coming back at some point, so keep it in the index".

Paul

The big benefit to having the redirects written into htaccess is that htaccess will run them much more quickly (and with lower server overhead) than from inside WordPress. If you only have a few redirects at a time to correct for moved pages or creating short URLs for marketing campaigns, doing it within the Redirection plugin is fine.

But if you're writing a large number of redirects (to handle a site move for example) you're far better off writing them into htaccess.

Paul

In my experience, the "juice" loss is cumulative, Zora. In addition, too many 301s in a row and eventually the search engines will quit following the request. On top of that, too many redirects and you may lose the referrer information, plus each redirect slows the eventual page load.

It's very seldom necessary to chain that many redirects though. Let's say you 301-redirect page A to page B. Later page B gets removed and you now want page A and page B to point to page C. You would have to create a new redirect for B to point to C, but you would also go back to the original page A redirect and change it to also point directly to page C, thereby avoiding the double redirect.

So:

Page A 301 redirect to Page B

Page B deleted and content move to Page C

New Page B 301 redirect to Page C

Change old Page A redirect to Page C

So now A and B both point to C without A needing to go through B to get there. One hop for each.

Make sense?

Paul

As all 3 of us have said here, Pioneer, there is no issue with setting things up the way you are proposing. Can't make it any clearer than that.

To answer your specific point - /sitemap and /sitemap.xml are categorically NOT seen as the same URL by search engines. They are absolutely considered two different pages. Your statement "...two items with the same url, but different file extensions..." is a non-sequitur. If the URLs have different file extensions, they are by definition NOT the same URL. The file extension (or lack thereof) is an integral part of the URL.

Since 3 different people have given you the same answer and you still don't believe us, why not simply test for yourself?

• Implement the two files as above, then use Google Webmaster Tools to report your XML sitemap location, and confirm that it's finding and recognizing it correctly.
• Then use your browser to go to the URL of the regular sitemap and you'll see that it renders the html version of your sitemap map just fine.

Paul

As Oleg says - not a problems at all. What you're proposing to do is a pretty standard implementation used by most websites out there.

XML sitemaps are a very specific configuration of data built to a standard that the Search Engines all agreed on - even the naming convention. Spiders are programmed to look for the whole filename (specifically including the .xml suffix) not just the first part of the file name. And yea, connecting to them inside your Webmaster Tools accounts is an extra signal for where the search engines should find them.

Paul

The citation finder tool at Whitespark (mentioned in one of my other comments) can also be really useful, Brett. One way you can use it is to check out the citations your local competitors have, so you can recognise and go after relevant citation sites that you may not have thought of.

www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Well worth a paid account for a couple of months at least. (No affiliation - just a great tool. And Canadian Note that as a Pro member here, there's even a perk for that: www.seomoz.org/pro-perks.

Paul