[hibernate-dev] Why do we have the date in the URL of blog posts?

[Vlad Mihalcea]

I also switched my blog from dates to simple slugs at the beginning of the
year.

As long as you add the proper Redirection rules in .htaccess_posts, it
shouldn't be any problem.

Google does not penalize 301 redirects, so you don't lose any SEO ranking
if you use 301 redirects.

We can also change the slug names for new articles only while leaving the
old ones as-is.

Vlad

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Yoann Rodiere <yoann at hibernate.org> wrote:

> > The data in the post slug only makes sense for news sites where posts are
> highly associated to a given date.
>
> A lot of our posts are. Release announcements and weekly newsletters in
> particular.
>
> I personally don't see the problem with dates in URLs. I don't see any
> problem with not having them, either. But I do see a problem with changing
> the URL scheme: potential dead links, SEO nightmare... We would need a damn
> good reason to do it, and I'm not sure those you mentioned are enough...
>
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2018 at 12:29 Vlad Mihalcea <mihalcea.vlad at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The data in the post slug only makes sense for news sites where posts are
>> highly associated to a given date.
>>
>> In our case, the data works against us as people might think an article is
>> outdated by just inspecting the slug and thinking that
>> a 3 year-old article might not be relevant anymore.
>>
>> It's better if we use simple slug names that capture the article focus
>> keywords and remove the date altogether.
>>
>> Vlad
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 10:23 AM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at hibernate.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > While talking to a few bloggers from the Java ecosphere at JavaLand last
>> > week, the question came up why we have the date in the URL of blog
>> posts.
>> >
>> > Arguably, it doesn't add value there (we show the date on the actual
>> posts
>> > themselves), and makes the URLs slightly worse to read. In particular,
>> we
>> > don't allow for browsing posts by year or month (e.g.
>> > http://in.relation.to/2018/), so it's even a bit misleading. Omitting
>> the
>> > date would also make the original idea of the URL fly again ("in
>> relation
>> > to xyz").
>> >
>> > Anyone with thoughts whether we should change the scheme (keeping
>> existing
>> > ones of course)?
>> >
>> > That all said, I've no idea whether the date in there is good to have or
>> > not in terms of SEO. I suppose it doesn't matter.
>> >
>> > --Gunnar
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> --
> Yoann Rodiere
> yoann at hibernate.org / yrodiere at redhat.com
> Software Engineer
> Hibernate NoORM team
>