Blog article URL - with or without date?

[onurkiyak]

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.

[David_ODonnell]

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.

[SoftzSolutions]

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.

[ThompsonPaul]

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

[David_ODonnell]

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!

[Dino64]

@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