Changing the permalink estructure, worth the risk in 2017 ?

[Glinski]

Hello, I have a wordpress blog that have more than 10 years old, when I created the blog the permalink had the date included.

Example: site.com/2007/02/02/my-post/

Do you guys think is it worth the risk of changing my url escructure to remove the date ? Ofcourse I would do the 301 redirects and such...

What I want to know if this will have any significant SEO advantage considering Google evolved so much ?
Thank you very much for reading my question

[seanginnaw]

Hey there,

Personally, I'm not a fan of date subfolders, especially if they're split into three. It creates an abnormally deep URL structure that doesn't seem overly logical.

Google have stated that using 301 redirects no longer loses link equity (Check out the link below!) so you wouldn't be at risk of losing any link juice if you did go this way.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

In terms of SEO advantage, I would say that putting your articles into 'themed' folders (think /blog/shoes as an example) would help as it would assist search engines in understanding your content, whilst including important keywords within the URL. Gianluca refers to these types of content pods as 'Topical Hubs' and his video is quite entertaining!:

https://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps,

Sean

[LoganRay]

Hi,

I wouldn't recommend doing this, it's going to be a lot of work and you probably won't see any benefit. The historical value of those URLs is much stronger than any boost you'd get by taking out a few date folders. It's very common for blogs to have this URL structure, search engines are well aware of this structure and aren't going to ding you for having long or deep folder URLs.

Additionally, since your blog is 10 years old, you've probably got tons of posts, which means tons of 301 redirects. You have to take Google with a grain of salt when they come out and say things like "301s pass all authority now", it doesn't mean you should go out and redirect every page on your site. At some point you're going to begin affecting page speed, particularly on mobile devices.