How to remove the dates from your permalinks

Today, as bloggers, we need quality over quantity. Most of us have hundreds, if not thousands of posts built up in the recesses of our blogs. And we’re still working to publish several times a week. And traffic is declining for blogs the world over.

To counter this trend, established bloggers are focusing on SEO like never before. Today we’re going to talk about one small part of boosting our SEO scores – evergreen content. Specifically how to turn a dated blog into a piece of evergreen content.

If you want to republish or repurpose a blog, do you remove the original publish date so it doesn’t display? Will it still ‘show’ to Google? How do we get a rescan from google?

What do you do if the permalink for the original blog has a date in it? All the blogs migrated from blogger used to have this permalink arrangement:

/year/mo/post-title.html

And once upon time it was the recommended best practice to use dates to keep the database / permalink connection faster for all WordPress blogs.

Now, most WordPress bloggers can safely use post-title permalinks without speed or database issues. So how does one remove these dates from your permalinks? And more importantly, not break any incoming links? Let’s get into it!

Does a post-name permalink help SEO?

At some point there was speculation that placing your keywords at the front of the url carried some benefit. According to that line of thinking, removing the dates would put your post title closer to the front of the link.

Personally, I’m skeptical of that belief. A few words in between the first character and last won’t change Google’s mind about the authority or relevancy of your post, in my estimation.

The other point made about dates and SEO is the freshness. We know that Google looks for fresh, relevant and authoritative content to best serve it’s searchers. Will removing the date (especially an old date) make your post seem more fresh? I think your best approach would be to use the post-name permalink in conjunction with the other things that tell Google the publish date. What surprises most is that the permalink is not what tells Google how old your post is. It is your publish date. 

The publish date may or may not be displayed on your post. For example, most templates don’t display dates on a Page but may on a post. Some templates will also display the updated date which is another option. Google decides how fresh your content is using these signals among thousands of others. To see a tutorial on how to let google know (truthfully) the date of a post, see this tutorial on Dates & SEO:

How to Remove Dates from WordPress URLs Without Breaking Links

Transitioning to a date-free URL structure requires careful attention to maintain existing traffic and SEO. Here’s a step-by-step guide, but again, please see additional considerations at the end before attempting this. And one more thing – do these steps in order. 🙂

Step 1: Backup Your Website

Before making any changes, backup your website. I’m not joking! DIYing this activity has a high chance of breaking links and you’ll want to put it all back before anyone sees!

Step 2: Implement Redirects to Preserve SEO

Changing URL structures can lead to broken links. Setting up 301 redirects ensures that visitors and search engines are directed to the correct content.

1. Install a Redirection Plugin:
   • From your dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
   • Search for Redirection by John Godley.
   • Install and activate the plugin.
2. Configure Redirects:
   • After activation, navigate to Tools > Redirection.
   • Click on Add New to create a new redirect.
   • Use the following settings:
     • Source URL: ^/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d{2})/(.*)$
     • Target URL: /$4
     • Regex: Check this option to enable regular expressions.

This configuration redirects URLs from the /year/month/day/post-name/ format to /post-name/. For a detailed guide on setting up these redirects, review John Godley’s plugin docs.

Step 3: Modify the Permalink Structure

NOW – you’re ready for the easy part! Head to settings and change the permalink like so:

1. Access Permalink Settings:
   • Navigate to your WordPress dashboard.
   • Go to Settings > Permalinks.
2. Select a New Structure:
   • Choose the Post name option. This changes URLs from /year/month/day/post-name/ to /post-name/.
3. Save Changes:
   • Click Save Changes to update your permalink structure.

Step 4: Update Internal Links

Ensure that all internal links reflect the new URL structure to prevent 404 errors. This will include ‘related posts’ that point a link or image to another post on your site.

Install the plugin

1. Use the plugin Search Regex again, by John Godley

Configure a one-time search & replace:

1. Navigate to Tools > Search Regex
2. In the Search for field, enter the regex expression (See NOTE below)
3. In replace with, enter the replacement expression
4. TEST and then Run the search/replace process.
5. See help docs here.

Step 5: Request Google to Recrawl Your Site

Informing Google of your URL changes helps in updating their index promptly. Ultimately they decide how often and if they will scan your site. But this is worth a try.

1. Use Google Search Console:
   • Log in to your Google Search Console account.
   • Navigate to the URL Inspection tool.
   • Enter the URL of your updated page.
   • Click Request Indexing to prompt Google to recrawl the page.
2. Use the Sitemap
   • You can also use the default sitemap created by Yoast SEO.
   • Head to the Google Search console
   • Navigate to the Sitemaps tool
   • Click “Add” and add the same url: mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml (use your domain of course)
   • Google will scan the sitemap and see the changes

Additional Considerations

Content Freshness: Regularly update your content to maintain relevance and improve SEO rankings. Do NOT remove dates or ‘falsely’ change the date without new and fresh content on the page. This tutorial covers how to update your dates / content and what is allowed.

Monitor Traffic: Use analytics tools to monitor traffic patterns and ensure that the URL changes positively impact your site’s performance.

Avoid Changing URLs of High-Ranking Posts: One more thing – if your post is doing well, I would caution against changing anything too drastically – and changing the URL IS drastic! We don’t know all the factors that go into Google’s decision making process and if your post is on the first page, is it really worth risking changing things?

If you’re looking for more SEO content, checkout this e-book, free audit and more tutorials.