Why I discourage embedding date in URL’s (including WordPress Permalinks and also other CMS)
Update: Google engineer, Matt Cutts agrees with me in recommending not including date information in the url. In his guidance for SEO optimization for blogs he notes:
I wouldn't bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I'd just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url.
The reasons I discourage date's in a permalink are:
- It is redundant information as date is already part of the post information and need not be additionally within the url.
- Search engines like google, which gives importance to words in URL's will be poisoned by url's with date embedded.
- Most browsers display a limited amount of url string. The url's show first when a page is downloading. Having a meaningful url gives them upfront knowledge about its relevance. Date is often not useful unless we are searching solely for news.
- Several content in a blog may not be time sensitive like useful tips, code examples etc. Embedding the date in url is meaningless there.
- There is value in keeping url as short as possible. In the rare case when someone will be forced to type your big wordpress url, he will curse you less if you do not have date and year embedded
Any questions?
Update: For a different view point, illustrating the benefits of having dates in permalinks, please refer to the excellent comments from Squeg. Read both and make your own decision.
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March 20th, 2005 at 5:22 am
So are you saying that having a url like http://www.example.com/archives/2004/10/12 is OK then? I can see where having that date plus an individual post name is redundant, but the above example allows folks to look at all the posts for a given day, month, or year. Kind of useful if you don’t want to track down the Archive links on the site.
March 20th, 2005 at 5:30 am
I just find point #5 somewhat ironic, given the current URL:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/Really Long URL]-cms/
March 20th, 2005 at 6:15 am
@Bob True, I make my subject descriptive.
It would be better if WordPress creates an excerpt to make the URL. However even as it stands now I wouldn’t want date information to make it even bulkier.
@Dave No, I am not. The subject (hopefully excerpted in future) provides much more useful information then either ?p=62736 or 2004/10/12 or /6737.
You however make a very good point. However how would you convey to the people that using this format you can get the posts of any particular day. If you write some documentation then I could equally argue that why not convey them to use a query string format as is available in WordPress. If you want to provide access through a widget like calendar then why not use the same query string format. In short I am unable to see any added value even in this case. Please let me know if I am missing something.
March 20th, 2005 at 9:39 am
Hmmm… ironically enough… the very first thing I was looking for when viewing this post was… the publication date… which at first glance was not visible anywhere… introducing a great deal of confusion on the relevance of this post.
In my opinion, time is not some redundant information to be haphazardly buried at the bottom of a random page. Au contraire. A timeline is essential to provide an immediate context to a post. Your post lack such a context. Instead it provides 89 random characters to cope with. Nothing to relate to. Quite a loss.
March 20th, 2005 at 1:51 pm
> This entry was posted on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 4:01 am and is filed under Technology, CMS, Internet, WordPress, WebLog.
Time is always part of a WordPress post. Kubric Theme just publishes it in a paragraph after the post. However one can always make it much more visible by putting it in top say by using the old WordPress template.
June 3rd, 2005 at 3:50 pm
Angsuman, I was just curious why you put the shadows on your screenshot for the reduced-dashboard? Is it just to make your screenshot thumbnail look interesting, or is it your watermark method?
Thanks for the plug in and info.
June 3rd, 2005 at 3:53 pm
Angs, I apologize — I posted the last comment in the wrong thread on your blog. I had too many windows open at once, and meant to post it under the Dashboard plug-in page.
June 3rd, 2005 at 8:00 pm
@dgold
I thought the effect was cool, so I experimented with it
June 3rd, 2005 at 8:55 pm
@dgold
Hey, we all make mistakes, no biggie
June 6th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
[...] ow, Google loves keywords in your URL. For those of you who don’t, I won’t be explaining it h [...]
June 11th, 2005 at 1:05 am
Hi.
I just imported hundreds of Blogger posts into Wordpress and now the permalinks are all different, so the posts that link to other posts don’t link properly.
Anyone know of a way to automatically make them match up or do I need to do it manually?
Thanks!
June 11th, 2005 at 7:31 am
@Hilary None that I know of.
June 11th, 2005 at 11:04 am
Ugh. Thanks.
November 23rd, 2005 at 6:52 am
[...] I set up Permalinks to include the date, and as soon as I did that I came across this article discouraging it. One of it’s arguments is that “It is redundant information as date is already part of the post information and need not be additionally within the url”, which is true if you actually go to the URL to begin with. The whole idea I thought was that if you send a link via email, or post it in a forum, for example, “http://blog.m-ph.com/11/14/2005/general/art-ilano/its-out/”, you’ll automatically see the date (along with the category, author and post title in this case), without having to click it, saving you time. At any rate, dealing with the .htaccess file is easy enough, so I’ll just fix that up if I change my mind. [...]
December 11th, 2005 at 10:42 pm
[...] By default WordPress uses a query string to identify a post. This is neither search engine friendly nor human friendly. A better way is to use a custom URI to better identify your posts. Many bloggers include a date as part of the permalink. I advise against it. The date of the post is not so important as to be part of the URI! [...]
March 15th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
[...] Yikes, what a title, eh? For those of you who know, Google loves keywords in your URL. For those of you who don’t, I won’t be explaining it here. [...]
October 30th, 2006 at 2:54 am
[...] XDForum (example: Anaconda Forum) is a nice basic forum software which works seamlessly with WordPress blogs (download our free theme and plugins). Unfortunately it works out-of-the-box with default permalinks only. Most site today use nice permalinks. This mini-tutorial will teach you how to use XDForum with nice permalinks (how to enable; tips and more). [...]
July 17th, 2007 at 5:09 am
If matt says it that must be a google friendly url.And your points are right on spot.