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.
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
-
Blogs Not Getting Indexed Intermittently - Why?
Over the past 5 months many of our clients are having indexing issues for their blog posts.
Technical SEO | | JohnBracamontes
A blog from 5 months ago could be indexed, and a blog from 1 month ago could be indexed but blogs from 4, 3 and 2 months ago aren't indexed. It isn't consistent and there is not commonality across all of these clients that would point to why this is happening. We've checked sitemap, robots, canonical issues, internal linking, combed through Search Console, run Moz reports, run SEM Rush reports (sorry Moz), but can't find anything. We are now manually submitting URLs to be indexed to try and ensure they get into the index. Search console reports for many of the URLs will show that the blog has been fetched and crawled, but not indexed (with no errors). In some cases we find that the blog paginated pages (i.e. blog/page/2 , blog/page/3 , etc.) are getting indexed but not the blogs themselves. There aren't any nofollow tags on the links going to the blogs either. Any ideas? *I've added a screenshot of one of the URL inspection reports from Search Console alt text0 -
SEO URLs: 1\. URLs in my language (Greek, Greeklish or English)? 2\. Αt the end it is good to put -> .html? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I must put URLs in my language Greek, Greeklish or in English? And at the end of url it is good to put -> .html? For exampe www.test.com/test/test-test.html ? What is the best way to get great ranking? I am a new digital marketing manager and its my first time who works with a programmer who doesn't know. I need to know as soon as possible, because they want to be "on air" tomorrow! Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Marios
Technical SEO | | marioskal0 -
Which URL structure is better?
Quick question - Have a real estate site focused on "apartments", but apartments in not part of my company name. That being said, should which of the following URL structures should I use? http://website.com/city/neighborhood/property-name OR http://website.com/city-apartments/neighborhood/property-name
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Link building with AddThis URL
We've begun using AddThis for tracking our social sharing. AddThis has been adding the snippet to the end of the URLs on our pages and we've been finding that people linking to us are linking to the URL with the snippet. AddThis says this isn't a problem for SEO. Is this correct? Here is an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/how-to-start-a-non-profit-organization-in-colorado.php#.UunCfPldVig I want to make sure this is not affecting our SEO in any way, particularly that Google would see this as an affiliate or paid link since it has the "#". I may be crazy but I just want to make sure!
Technical SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
To integrate a blog tool onto site - or build a blog solution - what's better for SEO?
Currently looking at adding a blog to our company site subdirectory and wanted to know if there was a SEO distinction between the following methods: Integrating a bolt-on blog tool with the site to create the blog VS. just using the current site infrastructure to build blog functionality. What's better for SEO? (and if tool integration is the overwhelming response - which tool?). Cheers.
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
Multilingual blogs and site structure
Hi everyone, I have a question about multilingual blogs and site structure. Right now, we have the typical subfolder localization structure. ex: domain.com/page (english site) domain.com/ja/page (japanese site) However, the blog is a slightly more complicated. We'd like to have english posts available in other languages (as many of our users are bilinguals). The current structure suggests we use a typical domain.com/blog or domain.com/ja/blog format, but we have issues if a Japanese (logged in) user wants to view an English page. domain.com/blog/article would redirect them to domain.com/ja/blog/article thus 404-ing the user if the post doesn't exist in the alternate language. One suggestion (that I have seen on sites such as etsy/spotify is to add a /en/ to the blog area: ex domain.com/en/blog domain.com/ja/blog Would this be the correct way to avoid this issue? I know we could technically work around the 404 issue, but I don't want to create duplicate posts in /ja/ that are in English or visa versa. Would it affect the rest of the site if we use a /en/ subfolder just for the blog? Another option is to use: domain.com/blog/en domain.com/blog/ja but I'm not sure if this alternative is better. Any help would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Seiyav0 -
How do I use only one URL
my site can be reach by both www.site.com and site.com. How do I make it only use www?
Technical SEO | | Weblion0 -
How to move my blog from subdomain to subfolder?
Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings. The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog. This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess? Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0