Leaving the Dates Out of Your URLs [Blogging Tip]

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Bruce Keener

For the past couple of years, my blog has used a URL structure of



http://www.domain.com/2009/03/19/article-title/

I recently learned that such a URL is less about 10% (or more) less likely to get clicked than the following one, which is the same but without the dates:



http://www.yourdomain.com/article-title/

So, I researched how I could go about changing to not using dates. I found the following code to put into my .htaccess file:


RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4

Of course, I had to change “domain.com” to “keenerliving.com”

In doing this, I have learned a good bit, and have written an the following article on Search Engine Land: A case study in changing URL structure. It has a great deal of additional information, including a better redirect rule, and is useful for anyone considering such a URL change. You should definitely not just use the above rewrite rule without reading the Search Engine Land article first.

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  • http://www.timeforblogging.com Joshua Dorkin: TimeforBlogging

    I’ve been interested in makng a similar move, but always feared the short term SEO implications. What kind of changes have you seen over the past week since implementation? Is the impact positive or negative so far?

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Joshua, the only effect I’ve seen so far is that the Google Toolbar Ranking for several of my more highly visited pages now shows “no rank,” instead of the rank of 4, 5, or 6 they previously had. How long this will remain is an unknown to me. In time, the rankings will catch back up, but I do not know how long it takes.

      In an effort to “speed up” the transfer of rankings to the new pages, I went all the way through my site this weekend (about 700 posts) and ensure that my links to internal pages used the new permalink structure. Obviously, someone with a large site would never want to spend the time doing this. And, even for a site my size, I am not sure it is worth the effort to do so. But, I thought it was time to give my site a detailed look anyway, and I combined doing that with changing my internal links.

      My links that have been good search targets still are. For example, even though my article on the iPod Touch as a PDA shows no Google Toolbar ranking (it used to show 5 or 6, I can’t remember which), it still is the top result in the Google SERPs for the search “ipod touch pda.”

      Google has been pretty quick to re-index my site, so that most of the links in the index now have the new permalink structure. So, that happens pretty quick.

      There has not been enough time to see if this will really increase traffic. The video I watched indicated that an increase of between 5% and 20% could be expected.

      Finally, just to be complete in my answer, my site does not have a lot of backlinks … it is not a niche site and I have never actively gone after getting backlinks. I do have a few high-quality backlinks, and several of lesser quality, but the total amount is small. Hence, my site does not serve as the best test case for this. Further, I may be complicating matters even more, because I have also decided to delete a lot of my old, low-value articles (those in the site news section, primarily). This may have some impact on my quality score (up or down) and should not have been done at the same time as the permalink structure change, because it will now be impossible for me to say which has done the most good (or ungood). Hence, if you do the change, you should be smarter than me about not doing other big changes at the same time. I am such an impatient person, though, that I wanted to go ahead and do both changes.

      Once the Google Toolbar rankings for individual pages start showing back up, I’ll update this article with that information.

      • http://www.timeforblogging.com Joshua Dorkin: TimeforBlogging

        Please do. I’m actually going to wait to make any moves until I hear more from you. I hope you find the move is successful.

  • http://ariwriter.com Ari Herzog

    Thanks for providing the easy-to-follow steps to do this, something I’ve been meaning to accomplish for several months. Of course, now all of my inbound links are causing 404 errors; but that will be hopefully be fixed once the search engines propagate the changes in my sitemap xml file.

    • http://ariwriter.com Ari Herzog

      …and it’s now fixed. Thanks for the help, Bruce!

      • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

        Glad to help, Ari. I learned from it, too!