Does changing a post’s publish date change its URL?
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I posted twice yesterday. But now I want the earlier of those two articles to appear later, in the hope that while it’s on top it might get a bit more attention. If I change its publishing date to today, I think that will change the post’s URL. But there have been some links to it already, and I don’t want to break the links that others have made to that post.
In an abundance of caution, I left the publication date alone (it’s still yesterday), but I changed the time of publication to make it the last post of that day. Now it shows up first on my blog once more, but that’s only until I post again. At that point, in order to preserve others’ links, must I leave that post with the publishing date it now has? I know I could make it a sticky, but is that my only recourse?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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It is never a good idea to change the date on an already published post since it does indeed change the URL which means that if the search engines have picked it up, it will then return a 404 file not found error.
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How does on resolve those 404 errors [shown in Google Webmaster Tools] that resulted for some change to a previously published URL? So far, it seem that time is my friend. Thanks TSP! –jim
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My experience has been that when I start to create a new post, wordpress automatically creates a URL for it containing the date as soon as I move away from the title block. When this shows, it also has an edit button beside it. While I have note done so, it appears that the URL could be edited to remove the date before the post is actually published. Could this be a way for allowing the presentation order (publication data and time) to be changed without affecting the URL?
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I’m sure WordPress has it’s reasons for making it work this way, but it seems silly to me. Blogger allows me to change my post’s publish date very simply and, as far as I know, this has never caused a problem with the linkage. Why would WordPress adopt such a difficult URL methodology?
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I guess we have to live with the situation as it is. So to keep a post on top, it’s either go the sticky route or nothing. Thanks for the input.
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@izaak, If at blogger, the date in the URL changes when you change the date on a post, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM with search engines, whether you realize it or not. You have 404 errors, and I chase those on blogs I administer all the time because the Google reports report all sorts of 404 errors when people change post titles/URL’s/dates.
If you want to publish a post, and then go in two weeks later and change the published date, be my guest – no one is stopping you, but by doing so you will have 404 errors when someone clicks on the link with the old date in a search at one of the search engines.
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Blogger does not change the permalink for the post when you change a published date on a previously published post.
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Man an I getting tired of tasting my foot! :oops: I just went back to my Blogger site only to discover that you are absolutely correct! What mislead me was the fact that, unlike WP, the date being inserted into the URL isn’t obvious. Since switching to WP for it’s ease of use, I only go there to add a post I created in WP. It seems that every time I think I found something that works better on Blogger, I find out that it’s not so. Right on WP!
But I’m still waiting for some rational explanation for including the date in the URL. After all, the URL doesn’t include the time, so it’s pretty obvious that sort order within a day at least is handled without without referencing it.
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Y’all have answered my question, so I’ll mark this “Resolved.” I think that suggestions to management about how to handle URLs should be a whole different topic. Thanks for all the responses.
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