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Went Hot: January 18, 2008 - 12:01 pm
Posted By: theGypsy 267 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: SEO
SNIP - Everything you do has a chance to provide a clean or dirty signal of relevancy to search engines and searchers.
While a date in the URL may provide a signal of relevancy to some searchers looking for archived information, many people who are explicitly looking for old information will likely put a date in their search query, which will match page text even if the date is not in the URL. Other searchers have a good possibility of rediscovering the information they read in the past with the help of search personalization algorithms. But most queries are not for old stuff. And that makes me believe that using the date in the URL causes more harm than good.
16 Comments
Comments
Ironically, we use dates in our URLs at SEL. The reason is that I found they were an excellent way to produce what I call rebuild safe URLs.
Danny, I would love to see a tutorial on how to remove dates in URLs with wordpress without messing everything up. I would have to screw up my PR and/or my indexed pages.
I much prefer to see a date in a URL. Very often I do need to know how old the information that I am looking at is.
I agree with @g1smd, I find myself viewing the urls of many posts to determine the age of the content.
Well, I'm not a big WordPress person, but maybe others can help. If you're using page titles, that sounds tough. You'd need to build a list of all the old URLs and 301 redirect them to the new ones. But you should be able to generate them out of WordPress easily enough.
This question came up in one of the forums I visit a few days ago. You could write all the redirects into the .htaccess file, and you would have to maintain that file on a regular basis.
You're much better off having all the data in a database and using that to generate the redirect headers. Most of what you need is already stored within WordPress itself.
Hmmm, might have to get my ones re-wrote, updating wordpress URLs is a piece of cake, go to your WP admin panel, click on options, click on permalinks, select - custom specify below and then place the following in the box:
/%postname%/
the URLs will automatically be re-written. The old ones get 301'd.
If something I wrote is old, I want my readers to know that. If something I wrote became inaccurate over time, it preserves my credibility to show that it's been quite a while since I said it.
CAM
I haven't actually experimented with it, but Wordpress is meant to sort out the redirects on your behalf now, though I haven't tested this at all, and if this changes server load.
There are also plenty of plugins which can deal with redirects without touching htaccess if you need to change slugs
Yeah, for my blog, it just sorts it all for me, if I want to change the name, not a problem, it is very sweet. I changed my mind about what I wanted to call this submission:
http://sphinn.com/story/21150
So I just went to edit post, changed the title and changed postslug on the right hand side, as you can see the redirect works perfectly.
OK. We can manually change post slugs and get redirects, as per the experiences mentioned here or the official guidance in http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.3 But can we also change URL STRUCTURES? Eavesy said so in his first comment, but I haven't seen it otherwise confirmed.
CAM
To change the structure, here's a plugin that accomplishes just that, http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/
Thanks. That's 50% of what I was looking for!!
I wish it also worked for category pages, but Joost de Valk and I seem to be the two people on the planet who think that having category pages rank is a GOOD thing.
CAM
Category pages are fine to rank... just watch out for any Duplicate Content issues.
Wordpress is very much improved in those matters, in the most recent version.
It's an interest point to raise, but a problem is that if you are running any kind of news content, dates are a good indicator of freshness and usefulness of the content. There's no point removing date URLs on news, only to increase your traffic - and bounce rate - by tricking users into finding old news.
However, it is a very good pointer for informational/help/guide structured posts, as these have a much longer shelf-life, and date indicators can dinimish the perceived worth of a page unnecessarily.
2c.
Good information. And it's true.