If you were working on a wine site would you include the wine year in the URL?

[DotCar]

I've come across a case where I'm asking myself what the best direction would be to go and while there is no right direction I would like to here some feedback from others.

I'm working with some great content pages all about wine.  As you probably know the difference between a 07 wine and a 95 is vastly different and up to this point I'm using the full year in the url much like this: grapesinyourtoesexample.com/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/.

What I'm worried about is my use of the year in the URL.  I feel it's very important for it to be used in the page title and on page but I'm concerned that it might be setting me back with my use of it in the url.  My concern is that search engines might be interpretting it as a datestamp rather than as a informational piece of data describing the asset.

Looking at my competitors, my content is one of the only sites using the year and in most searches for various wines my content is in the second half of the SERPs.

If you were creating this content would you use the year?  If you were working with current content would you drop the year across all of the site and implement to necessary redirects?

Just to be clear this is a client related project so my use of "my site|my content" refers to the client's content.

[Copstead]

I believe it would be smart to use the year in the url do to the fact that people may be searching for a 2007 Cellar-pod Adelaide Hills Viognier.  As long as the year is on the page as a header to reinforce what the url is saying.

[EGOL]

lol

If you are selling MD 20/20, TBird, NTE or Rip you can probably leave the year off.

If you have single pages - by vintage - and people use the year in their searches then it could be an important way to differentiate your site.  And, possibly a way to keep your single pages straight.

[DotCar]

So the real question I'm getting at is this.  Do you feel the that SEs might be evaluating the date as a sign of un-fresh content it a new page is created with a 2007 date in it?

http://www.quora.com/Are-dates-and-months-in-the-url-of-a-blog-post-detrimental-to-long-term-SEO

http://www.seobook.com/do-you-put-dates-your-urls

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/url-configuration-wordpress/

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/avoid-numbers-your-url/

[ShaMenz]

Hi Ryan,

A lot of people have gotten much more worried about dates since they heard about the "Freshness Update" late last year. Unfortunately a lot of people assume that it is a factor for all keyword terms & niches, but that is not the case. It is quite easy to find out whether it is a factor for your keywords. I gave a detailed explanation of this in this Q&A thread in November.

As is mentioned in the Quora thread you quoted, there are much more reliable ways for search engines to determine freshness (timestamps & previous crawl data).

I would agree with Brent and EGOL that the significance of year to your user base makes it reasonable (more likely expected) to include the year. However, I would take it a step further and suggest that you consider leveraging the intelligence of the bots a little.

We know that  bots are now smart enough to help assess relevance. In fact it has become the centerpiece of their day to day work.  For me, that should mean that using words like "wine" or "vintage" would signal to the search engine that this URL and its content might reasonably include date references in the form of 4 digit and/or 2 digit year information

That decided, I would build my site infrastructure accordingly, placing individual pages within directories using a reasonable and natural naming structure that includes the appropriate words. Depending how you prefer to approach it, a couple of possible examples might be  grapesinyourtoesexample.com/07-vintage/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/ or grapesinyourtoesexample.com/red-wines/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/.

Hope that helps,

Sha