Seriously, my permalinks contain the date, category, as well as the post title. I think this results in the best combination permalink, and Google certainly seems happy with it. Ironically enough I was forced to keep my permalink structure set up like this, otherwise several of my plugins crucial for my blog would break.

I’ve been debating whether to remove time stamps altogether, but the reality is some of my content can still be considered time based, and without leaving a date it could likely mislead the reader. I’m not sure leaving it in just my permalink would be enough.

As for my photoblog, I’ve toyed with the idea of removing all mentions of a date alltogether. Since all I have for each post is a photograph I’m not sure that the date is something that the reader even needs to see.

My personal challenge regarding this concept, however comes with me being able to quickly scan a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for time relevant results. Google doesn’t show helpful information like when the page was indexed, or last updated, so unless the site’s operators are allowing the permalink structure to show dates (like Lorelle’s site here tells me that this post was created June 25th, 2007) I have to “take the risk” that a helpful post title will give me relevant answers.

For these reasons, other research and gut feelings, at BoldlyGoing.com and AreYou.BoldlyGoing.com we have decided to set up what we believe to be an effective permalinking structure that will give (people like me) visual clues as to date relevancy on the SERP’s, and may (or may not, who really knows) better ranking on those same pages.

We’ve gone to one directory level with the year/month/date. It actually would look more like this in the URL: bg.com/2007_06_25/post-title-goes-here/ There’s some speculation that dashes are used by the algorithm to separate words, while underscores “_” simply extend a word (meaning that it is all “one” word, not split up words). There are also believers out there that the closer your post page is to the top of your directory tree, the better it ranks. 4 directories down is where the post on this page appears to the spiders. Not sure I believe this makes a difference, but if it does…

Finally, some SEO folks think that the date directory structure is not needed and may hurt results. Again, not sure I believe that, but if it does, we felt that going with the entire date structure in one directory, and underscored vs. dashed was the way to get the good visual information into the URL so we could be just that much more relevant for the folks that find our links in the search engines.