If you were working on a wine site would you include the wine year in the URL?
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site appears to rank very low
Hi, A site we manage is ranking very low for it's main key phrases. The site is www.moremouse.com. For example for the phrase "orlando vacation rentals" it ranks around page 12 which seems very low considering the DA, PA, links, etc. compared to many sites ranking much much higher. Can anyone see anything obvious that is causing it to rank so low? Thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | QbicIS0 -
Integrate a blog within an existing site
Hello everyone! I work on a website of a very small company and so far no one has ever implemented (not even thought about) a proper content strategy. The only content on the site are products description. Through Analytics I discovered lots of opportunities and topics to be covered which would massively increase the traffic, increase the engagement and (hopefully) sales. Problem is that I don't really know how to integrate a blog into the existing site; my first thought was wordpress What is the best way to do it?
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Mixing hyphens and underscores in a url
Hello. I am working on a site that was built with underscores in the urls, but only in the page names, not in the subdirectories. All the subdirectories have one-word names. So a typical url is "example.com/sub1/sub2/page_name." We would like to change the name of one of the subdirectories to a name that would be very useful for SEO, but this new name is a hyphenated word, let's call it "new-sub." If we changed "sub2" to "new-sub" then our url would have a mix of underscores and hyphens: example.com/sub1/new-sub/page_name. But if I used "new_sub" instead, google would read the words as connected with an underscore, instead of reading the subdirectory as a hyphenated word, which would be less useful for SEO. It seems like it might be a problem to have a hyphen in a subdirectory and underscores in the page names. But I want the SEO value of the hyphenated word. Any recommendations? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Redirecting URLS on windows
Could anyone help out here please. A client of ours have reveloped their website from HTML to ASP (helpful!). They have 60 odd pages indexed in Google with the .html extension. We need to do a redirect on these pages so that all link juice is passed to the new pages. What would be the best way to do this please?
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
SEO Site Planning Tool?
Does anyone know of a good SEO Site planning tool? I see that SEOBOOK has something that looked interesting but they want $300/mo! Thanks in advance! Andy
On-Page Optimization | | MaxOtto0 -
20 x '400' errors in site but URLs work fine in browser...
Hi, I have a new client set-up in SEOmoz and the crawl completed this morning... I am picking up 20 x '400' errors, but the pages listed in the crawl report load fine... any ideas? example - http://www.morethansport.co.uk/products?sortDirection=descending&sortField=Title&category=women-sports clothing
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Canonical URL problem
On page analysis wanted me to add a canonical url tag. However I added then re ran the on page analysis and it came up with an error. What is the proper way to add a canonical url tag in the head of an index page? ie. add a canonical tag to www.hompeage.com/index.html would it be ? Or should I ignore this for a home page? Because I add it then run the analysis again and get this? Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.ensoplastics.com/index.html"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> <dd>So do I add it or not? If I don't I get a lower page rating if I take it off I get a higher page rating with room for improvement. </dd> </dl>
On-Page Optimization | | ENSO0 -
Ecommerce Product Subcategory URL
Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header. The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories. Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters). Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there? The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories. i.e. domain.co.uk/subcategory or domain.co.uk/category/subcategory Thanks in advance for any advice given.
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0