Neu registrieren / Login

Do dates in URLs determine freshness?

 
 

Video Video

You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.
 
 

Abstract Abstract

Question: “Do dates in URLs determine freshness?”

Answer: No, that could be abused too easily. Google uses their own measurements to determine freshness. For example, they look at the first time the crawler went over the page and then they look how much the content has changed with each consecutive visit.
0:00
Filipe Santos from New York asks: „Do dates in the URL of blogs or websites help determine freshness of the content or is it largely ignored?“.

0:11
Well, I think dates in the URL or in the content can be very useful but people can also try to optimize that and say they're always 10 minutes old. So we have our own measures of how fresh pages are, for example, the first time that our crawler saw a page. We also look at revisiting pages, how much the content changes.

0:31
So I think it's a good idea to have a URL very clearly somewhere on your page that people can find out how old the content is but I don't think that you necessarily need to do it for Googlebot's sake.

0:42
So it's a good usability thing but Google has it's own ways of measuring how fresh various content is. You don't need to worry about having the date in the URL or directly in the content, just to convince Google that it's fresh. We already do that computation to figure it out for ourselves.