Date in permalinks. Bad?
-
Hello!
I have a recipe website with over 1000 posts. Currently I have the month and year in the permalink that everyone is hinting off to me is bad. On the same front people tell me if I change the permalinks to just the post name it's going to significantly slow down my site.
I'm torn on this one about changing. From Google's standpoint is it better to change to the post name and if so should I be fearing I'm going to run into trouble with the change?
Any suggestions you have would be appreciated.
Thanks!!!
-
I'm assuming the permalink is the domain.com/blog/year/month/date/postname type structure, the Wordpress default? Going from so many unnecessary folders to fewer seems like it can only speed things up a bit.
I'd recommend a structure such as domain.com/recipes/�tegory%/%postname%/ if you have them categorized by types of meal. Google likes to see a logical folder structure. Makes for solid human readability as well.
And don't forget to redirect old permalinks to new permalinks. If there are any posts linked out there, you'll want to be sure they redirect to the new permalink.
-
Thank you for this info. I've been going back on forth in removing the dates probably for at least a year now. Always concerned about performance but I know that leaving the dates in there is just bad. We're going to give it a shot and see what happens. People keep telling me with as many posts that I have the concern is performance but maybe this is just bad info. Thanks!
-
The problem is that it dates your posts, so your click-through & time on page could be negatively impacted if the audience believes it's outdated information.
My advice is to make the change and check the performance speed after. I believe that Wordpress has addressed this issue anyway with this update. If you are worried you can add a post ID to the post name tag, but I personally wouldn't be worried about it. If performance is truly that bad you can always go back.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Are on-site content carousel bad for SEO?
Hi, I didn't find an answer to my question in the Forum. I attached an example of content carousel, this is what I'm talking about. I understand that Google has no problem anymore with tabbed contents and accordeons (collapsible contents). But now I'm wondering about textual carousels. I'm not talking about an image slider, I'm talking about texts. Is text carousel harder to read for Google than plain text or tabs? Of course, i'm not talking about a carousel using Flash. Let's say the code is proper... Thanks for your help. spfra5
Technical SEO | | Alviau0 -
Some Old date showing in SERP
I see some old date Jan 21 2013 showing up for some categories in Google search results. These are category pages and I do not see the date in view source. This is not a wordpress site or a blog page. We keep changing this page by removing/adding items so it is not outdated.
Technical SEO | | rbai0 -
Schema markup for products is missing "price": Is this bad?
Hey guys, So a current client of mine has an e-commerce shop with a few hundred products. They purposely choose to keep the prices off of their website, which is causing errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Basically the error shows: Error: Structured Data > Product (markup: schema.org) Error type: missing price 208 items with error Is this a huge deal? Or are we allowed to have non-numerical prices for schema ie. "call for quote"
Technical SEO | | tbinga1 -
Rich Snippet Date Removal
Hey Mozzers, I'm having a real problem getting some rich snippet data to go away! Normally i'm all for it, but in this case it's giving our department page a video rich snippet and also a really super old date (i'm not sure if this is connected with the video rich snippet, but it showed up at the same time). The SERP is here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=pool+table&pws=0&hl=en&num=10 We are 3rd for our page http://www.libertygames.co.uk/store/pool_tables/ I can't find the date Google is using anywhere on the page, in the headers or file dates or anything. I've even removed the video markup and removed the page from the video sitemap, the rich snippet testing tool confirms this : http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.libertygames.co.uk%2Fstore%2Fpool_tables%2F Does anyone have any ideas why this might be showing up or if there is a way to speed up getting it off there and our old meta description back? I'm pretty sure it's killing our click-throughs. Thanks in advance, Stuart
Technical SEO | | stukerr0 -
Can hotlinking images from multiple sites be bad for SEO?
Hi, There's a very similar question already being discussed here, but it deals with hotlinking from a single site that is owned by the same person. I'm interested whether hotlinking images from multiple sites can be bad for SEO. The issue is that one of our bloggers has been hotlinking all the images he uses, sometimes there are 3 or 4 images per blog from different domains. We know that hotlinking is frowned upon, but can it affect us in the SERPs? Thanks, James
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK0 -
Where does Google pull the date stamp?
We're a news media site with content that has been live for a few years. All of a sudden, Google is showing our content (even though no one has touched the file) with a date stamp of '3 days ago'. Even for content that is years old. I checked the date it was last cached, and it doesn't even match. The URLs were last cached on January 16, but the date stamp says '3 days ago.' From where does Google pull the date stamp? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Seeing non-www in yahoo results - good or bad?
My site ranks for both domain versions but more non-www than www - Should I make it one or the other? How do I tell Yahoo to just choose one? Ehh?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610 -
How do you manage Wordpress URL hierarchy with permalinks?
I have quite a few website in Wordpress but I continuously run into the same issue. With permalinks it is not recommended to use /%category%/%post_name%/ because it puts an undue load on your bandwidth, server and makes the crawler crawl a ton of duplicate content pages. On one site changing to that hierarchy even crashed some of the pages (probably a permissions error). I would like a correct information hierarchy, but this doesn't seem like correct play. What do you use as your URL hierarchy?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider
Do you have any plugins or fixes for this issue? Thanks0