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
-
URL for a new website
Hi, I am creating a new website for a client. Is it best to include the keywords from the most common search in the domain name, they would like: forenamesurname.com but should I be recommending: weddingmakeupbyforename.com Does it make much difference to search rankings if the keyword is in the domain name? Thanks v much
On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn100 -
Language for URLs on new international websites
We are due to launch our new site and it will be targeting an international market. We have setup these new sites in the following way www.website.com/fr/content-goes-here www.website.com/es/content-goes-here This has been done in conjunction with setting up the parameters in GWT and making sure it is optimised for the language itself, and that countries search engine. But our web dev team have said that the URLs at the moment will be in english and not the native language, so if you were on the french version of our site you would see the url in english and not french. Will this negatively affect the site for SEO, and who else would think it would be negative from a usability perspective? Any help is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RyanCrawf19840 -
Why is my site not ranking?
Could you please help me understand what is wrong with this site: www.award-certificates.com It simply isn't ranking after about 3 years and I am not so sure what I can do to improve it.
On-Page Optimization | | nicolebd0 -
Canonical URL tags help I am not sure what this is
I am trying to get an A grade on my webpage and this is one of the critical steps canonical URL tags I cant find much information as to what this even is never mind fixing it. Thanks I am a total newbe at this any advice is appreciated
On-Page Optimization | | gemfirez0 -
Canonical URL Tag
Hi, I have two pages that are identical on my site: http://www.absolutepower.nl/creatine-monohydraat and http://www.absolutepower.nl/CREATINE/creatine-monohydraat Should I use the canonical URL tag in this case? Thanks, Jasper
On-Page Optimization | | Japking0 -
What is wrong with this site
Hello, I need advice regarding design ( current design as well as any changes ) and seo advice as to what we should do to promote the site. The site in question is - Allkindofessays.com Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
Maximum length of a URL for good SEO?
Hi there, We have a content database as part of our site and I noticed that the way the database is loaded with new content, it means that the URL’s for these pages are really long, around 100 characters or sometimes more http://www.xxxyy.org/knowledge-base/documents/word1-word2-word3-word4-word5-word6-word7-word8 Is there a suggted maximum character length for a URL? Kind of like for title tag where I max out at 69… Should I truncate the URL’s or at least reduce the numbers of words in them to something less spammy? Does that make a difference? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20