Comments on: Blogging Tip: Don’t Use Dates in Your Permalink Structure

By: admin

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:58:33 +0000

Chris: I’ve read about that, but never had any problems. Of course, if this is a concern, there’s still no need to include dates. Just include the post ID. As for redirection, I’m not crazy about plugins for mission critical functions. What if the plugin author loses interest and a future WP update breaks compatibility? I would much prefer to handle something like this with a hand-coded .htaccess redirect.

Financial Samurai: It depends on your goals. If you generate traffic based on a high volume of time-sensitive content (like Mashable or Engadget) then having dates probably doesn’t matter. But if you produce evergreen content and you’re looking for an SEO edge, then you should avoid dates for all of the reasons I detailed above.

By: Financial Samurai

Financial Samurai — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:24:32 +0000

Very helpful thoughts CJ! If Mashable and Engadget are using dates, I think so can I.

By: Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:49:44 +0000

Something that people need to consider, though, when it comes to WordPress permalinks is that employing this technique could have a performance impact on your site.

From WordPress’s documentation:
“For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.”
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

I am not sure if this affects other blogging platforms, but there is a reason, I think, why the big blogs use dates in their permalinks (e.g. Engadget, Mashable, Smashing Magazine, etc.).

Also, WordPress does not handle this automatically so if you do change your permalinks, you will loose any backlinks pointing old content unless you install a plugin that does this for you. There are several out there and I have used one called “Redirection” for my clients. If you have a lot of previous content or if your blog has been around for a while, you can seriously affect your page rank unless you handle the 301 redirects properly. There are lots of things to consider here that were not discussed in this post…

By: admin

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:33:15 +0000

You can certainly get by with dates in your permalinks, but if you keep at this long enough, you will inevitably run into situations where you wish you didn’t have them. Since there is no real advantage to having the date in the permalink, I would advise avoiding it. I would also have to say that “consistent and fresh content is what matters” is an oversimplification. Yes, fresh content is important, but from an SEO perspective, links are hugely important.

As for changing your permalink structure, you can do this from the WordPress dashboard (under Settings/Permalinks). If you don’t want old links to break, you’ll need to set up a redirect. In theory, you should be able to pass the link juice to the new url, but there are no guarantees.

I am planning on experimenting with the changeover on one of my other sites, and will report the impact on search traffic when I do so.

By: CJ Bowker

CJ Bowker — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:21:01 +0000

That definitely makes sense and something I never thought of. I’m new to blogging and didn’t realize that when you update the post the link will change with the new date. I thought the date just stayed as the original date. My big question is, how do I fix this?
Do I just not use a date going forward?
Do I go back and change the other links?
I’ve only been blogging for a couple months.

By: Financial Samurai

Financial Samurai — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:40:17 +0000

Good thoughts, and something I have thought about as well. But, does it really matter in the long run given consistent and fresh content is what matters? Why would i be republishing my posts instead of writing new ones? If I wanted to highlight the old post with a new edition, why not just copy and paste it, and really alter it so as not to write the same thing and entitled it something new or different?

Did you have your perma lnk structure different before and noticed a change to your traffic?

Finally, how does one change the permalink structure going forward in WordPress without changing all the old links and therefore losing all the linkage?

Thnx for your thoughts!

Sam

By: jim

jim — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:08:40 +0000

Those are some good reasons not to use dates, it’s amazing how limiting they can be once you realize all the things you can’t do. At first it just seems like your URL has some dates… and then you peel open the onion.