Comments on: How to Rank Well in Google with Your Blog Matt Cutts Style

By: renan orola

renan orola — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:44:40 +0000

nice blog it is very informative more people appreciate this kind of blog..thanks for the tips i learn in this blog.

By: Team Nirvana

Team Nirvana — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:07:46 +0000

Great tip.No matter how many years earlier it had been posted. This is very valuable to the new bloggers like me. Thanks for sharing them.

By: David Gonzales

David Gonzales — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:04:51 +0000

Great tips! Will consider them once I move to a self-hosted blog

By: fher98

fher98 — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:12:52 +0000

I have spent the last few days trying to make up my mind about how to write my permalinks,.. before reading this post i was using the ugly p=?number,… now I believe this post has pretty good advise on the subjet,.. just change my permalinks to %postname%,..

thanks for quite a usefull info!!!

By: Lon Kost

Lon Kost — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:23:49 +0000

Usefull information and all is good arranged. Just want to say that I find your site enough interesting for me.

By: How to switch to Google-optimized permalinks in WordPress - Blogging Robots

How to switch to Google-optimized permalinks in WordPress - Blogging Robots — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:37:05 +0000

[...] Darren Rowse wrote today the points he extracted from interview of Performancing with Matt Cutts, Google engineer, where he talks about optimizing blogs for search engines. [...]

By: Successful Blog - Sunday Link Love: 15 Great Finds on Promotion, Working at Home and Productivity

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 16:10:42 +0000

[...] How to Rank Well in Google with Your Blog Matt Cutts Style [...]

By: miscblogger

miscblogger — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 19:20:54 +0000

Hey Everybody, this is what I do with the dates in permalinks. I used to do the default wordpress url/year/month/day/postname. Then i read this article. So i decided to use a url/year-month/postname. i just used my htaccess file to do 301 redirects so it will be a seemless experience for returning and new visitors. so far, its been working great. check it out at http://freewarereview.info and http://bankblog.info.

By: BlogBoy

BlogBoy — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:01:43 +0000

Quick question: why hasn’t anybody tried to use /postname/ first, and then the date? So that it would be:

http://www.yourblog.com/post_title_with_keywords/2005/12/16

Let me know if this is feasible at all… the point of this of course, is to get the keyword closer to the site’s address, which is the real factor for search engines if I understand correctly. This way, you could have both the keyword boost and the archival/organizational value of using the date.

By: TLB

TLB — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 07:10:07 +0000

Addendum to #19: If WP doesn’t do a 301 redirect, but just transparently shows the contents at the old URL at the new URL, that would probably be a problem. In that case you’d be showing the same the same content at two different URLs. If you have links to both forms of the URL and one doesn’t redirect to the other, one of those is probably going to end up in the supplemental results, and the pagerank derived from the links to that page will probably be lost.

So, WP doing a 301 is the best option and probably what they do. But, in that case your web server has to do extra work everytime someone requests an “old” URL: it has to figure out the page has been moved and then serve the 301. Then, it gets an additonal request for the “new” URL. There might even be more redirects involved in some cases where, for instance, it redirects from site.com/dir to site.com/dir/ (with the slash on the end).

By: Chris Howard

Chris Howard — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 23:51:50 +0000

What’s the relevance of dates in URLs? Who even cares about finding posts by date when they’re reading most blogs? (Cary’s excellent example excepted)

So what’s the point of dates in URLs? I use seach to find old posts. I don’t go “Hmmm? I wonder what Fred wrote on blogging in February?” or “I know that post on Google adding glom-detection was around August…”

Besides Cary’s example, I’m yet to see how dating URLs adds value to *most* blogs.

The posts themselves are dated, so a person can easily distinguish between which (on a topic) was written more recently if that’s important.

If your blog is a diary…then maybe it’s of value to be able to go back to April 2000 and see that you were going through your cheese phase.

Otherwise, dating URLs is a throwback to when blogs were simply glorified diaries and most modern blogs don’t need to do it.

What we needed is advanced search in WordPress (I can’t speak for the others) so users could search by words, categories, dates etc and combinations thereof. If someone knows of one for WP – please let me know!

By: TLB

TLB — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 22:52:47 +0000

“you can stop using the dates today if you choose, and it won’t break any of your old link love”

Does WP use a 301 redirect to send /date/post.html to post.html? If so, it might take a while for the search engines to a) figure that out and show the new page and b) give the new page the same pagerank as the original page.

By: Esoos

Esoos — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 07:41:56 +0000

Actually, I don’t think it’s the date in itself that’s the problem, rather it’s that fact that each date segment adds another directory level.

From my experience, the deeper the page, the less often it gets crawled, the longer it takes to get assigned PageRank, and the poorer it tends to rank in general. Of course, that varies with the popularity of the site, as a popular site can afford to have pages buried several directory levels deep and still do quite well. But newer or less popular sites can be putting themselves at a disadvantage.

By: Dmitry Chestnykh

Dmitry Chestnykh — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 05:38:27 +0000

Duncan Riley: No, WordPress “slugs” are unique for each post. If you had a post called “something”, the next post on this will be “something-1″.

By: SEO für Blogs - Orakel-Blog - Webmarketing, Suchmaschinenoptimierung und Internetinformationen für KMU

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 04:37:04 +0000

[...] Suchmaschinenoptimierung wird für Blogs gerade dann wichtig, wenn sie mit Anzeigen wie Google AdSense direkt Geld einbringen sollen. Auch Blogs mit reinem PR-Charakter stehen in den Suchmaschinen gerne gut da. Ein Interview von Nick Wilson mit Matt Cutts von Google (via Problogger und einfach persönlich) ging auch auf die Wege, wie Blogs suchmaschinenoptimiert werden können, ein. Er vertritt vier Thesen: [...]

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 01:21:43 +0000

Tommy – as far as i see they are not penalising the use of dates but rather they seem to give more weight to keywords in titles. Google looks for keywords from your post in many positions – all Matt was saying (if I’m reading him right) is that while many bloggers differentiate their posts with numbers that it’d be more effective at getting indexed for certain keywords if you included those words in your URL instead of numbers.

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:42:11 +0000

Problem is if you dont use a date in the URL you run the risk of duplicate entries, if you are writing 30 posts a week chances are you are going to repeat your headline on occasion, dates makes sure this cant happen.

By: Dmitry Chestnykh

Dmitry Chestnykh — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:37:18 +0000

Here's instructions on how to switch to "postname.html" URLs without losing old permalinks (for WordPress).

By: Cary

Cary — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 19:46:08 +0000

One caveat that hasn’t been mentioned here…if you’re writing about medical research, you may want to keep your dates in place. I for one get a large percentage of my traffic from people looking for research published during specific months/years.

This is not a case of one size fits all.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:58:31 +0000

This goes well with what I had to say on WordPress and Permalinks. Dates to me are more of a publishing issue than a SEO one.