Google is Ageist: For maximum SEO, don’t put dates in URLs
When fresh content is king, dated writing is stale. (Like this post’s punning reference to Will Smith’s TV career.) That means making your site’s URLs indicate the year, month, and/or date of a post’s publication — which is how many WordPress sites work — is a bad idea.
Google gives priority to recent posts more than ever, so you should only use post names and possibly category/tag names in your WordPress permalink URLs. Previously there was a performance loss incurred in WordPress if you did this, but with the release of WordPress 3.3 that is no longer the case. Yoast has all the details and a handy tool to help you switch out your old dated URLs and boost your SEO.
Despite having given this advice, I think it’s unfortunate because URLs that indicate dates are providing some valuable information. I’ve seen more and more sites with a traditional blog format that don’t even put post dates near the byline at the top or bottom of the articles. You have to look for comments then to determine the date of the information, which is often a very important thing to know.
Older information (or openness about it) really should not be penalized. More importantly, the recent changes in the Google search algorithm that favor recency are not really helpful for searchers in a lot of scenarios, like “what’s the best…” questions where it’s the authoritativeness and quality of an answer that really determines what you want to know.
Older posts are often the best ones in these cases, or critical to review in light of more recent views. This may be more true in humanistic fields of knowledge, but it also goes for fast-changing technical fields. ”What’s the best plugin for X? What’s the best way to do Y in CSS?” Often there is a “classic” post (or three) out there that really explains the issue best. More recent posts may provide insight as to how the classic answer is being modified or challenged now, or they may just be freshness bait.
I’m afraid we’ll see a lot more freshness bait now and less of the classic way that knowledge is sifted and winnowed — by recognition of classic authorities on the one hand and new challengers trying to join their ranks or displace a predecessor.
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So then, it’s about SEO. Ah, I should have guessed. So this is why I am coming across dateless content more and more lately? (I knew it smelled funny.) I find it annoying. Begrudgingly, I keep reading if I like the content but I am rather spoiled to seeing dates. Actually, it makes me quite miffed. Dates matter. I feel like a post is incomplete without one. I search and search for the date but feel lost in space. It is bewildering. Doesn’t make the reader happy. Writers, don’t make me work too hard or you will lose me. Meet my basic expectations even if you have to sacrifice a little SEO. Cough up the dates or you will lose your cred. And, bad Google.
I agree, dates matter. Once again today I was looking up the “best” plugins and methods for doing x, y and z in WordPress, and after finding a seemingly good answer, I wonder how dated the information is. No dates, except on comments.
I’d like to think Google will notice the problem and realize they are overly biasing the definition of “relevance” toward “recency.” It’s not in their interest to incentivize mildly evil “SEO” practices that make us work to glean critical information that’s being deliberately masked.