Having the date in the URL structure for blog posts?

Cristian Level X³

July 22, 2016, 10:39 am

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Having the date in the URL structure for blog posts?

What do you guys think about having the date in the URL structure of blog posts?
Example: .com/blog/2016/07/some-example-keyword/

I personally think its way better for SEO to have a clean URL. Meaning I'll remove the date part from the slug. Result: .com/blog/some-example-keyword/

I've seen lots of important companies that have blog posts URLs with the date in it. Are these companies unaware of SEO best practices? Or leave the default Wordpress structure can actually be somehow relevant?

Also, as a side not, all blogspot blog posts have also the date in the URL structure. But unlike Wordpress, you can't remove it.

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Webguy2024

Christian this is a good question. I have never tested keeping a date in the URL as opposed to removing it. If anyone has tested this scenario please post your answer because I too would like to know the results.

8 years ago

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anwebservices

I guess it's not disadvantage for SEO, but not even advantage at all. It's made only for purpose if you multiple posts with same title, so the URL can be different, but it's very rare nowadays to have such situation. Search engine crawlers probably filtering these dates out and reading title keywords only... Clean URL without date is better and looks nicer anyway

8 years ago

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Everett

If I ever have to use Wordpress I go straight into the permalink structure and make the URL read as the following:

http://www.example.com/this-is-a-blog-post-and-its-better-for-seo

Sometimes I may even apply the category such as:

http://www.example.com/summer/this-is-a-blog-post-and-its-better-for-seo

I typically don't see the need to include article IDs, nor categories in the URL so I'll just leave the link structure to display the actual article's title.

I don't like seeing blogs, especially major corperations using dates, or other old, not used anymore link structures. It's sort of a pet peeve of mine. Why would you do that? Are blog dates in the URL even relevant for search engines?

8 years ago

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Cristian

Same here, permalink structure for Wordpress seems like the best choice. As for ID in URL, sometimes they can be very helpful, especially when you have Facebook Ads and other social media campaigns. Also, IDs in URL are pretty much a must for big e-commerce/online stores websites on platforms like Magento for example.

And yes, dates in URL were at one point relevant, but now all the evidence seems to point the contrary.

8 years ago

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Lynne

No I don't put the date into the url of my posts ever. I use my keywords only

Yes I have at times had the year in the url before for example if my keyword would be "best posts for 2016" or something like that.

8 years ago

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vinaya

I think there is some kind of benefits of having a date on your url structure. For example the date shows how old your content is. Older the content, more value it has (however, it also should be regularly updated. As far as I know, title is more important than url. I have tested this. I once tweaked the title of my non performing blog post. I did not change the url structure. The updated article got a good PR even though the url was same.

7 years ago

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SEOClerks

Having the date in the URL structure for blog posts?

Having the date in the URL structure for blog posts?

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