DISC Inc

89% said less time will be spent on reporting. 

Do article URLs need dates in them?No. If you currently use dates in your article URLs (like theguardian.com does), you don’t need to remove them. It’s fine to have them, but there may be a small downside with regards to evergreen content that you want to rank beyond the news cycle;

Should article URLs have a folder structure?This is optional, but it might help. Google likes to see relevant entities that are mentioned in an article reflected in the URL

Can the URL be different from the headline?Yep, as long as they convey the same meaning.

Can you use special characters in a URL?Short answer; yes, but you shouldn’t.

Long answer; special characters are often processed just fine, but sometimes can lead to issues when a character needs to be encoded or is otherwise not easily parsed. It ’s better to keep things simple and stick to basic characters. Use the standard alphabet and limit your non-text characters to hyphens and slashes.

Is capitalisation okay?This is one of those grey areas where you’ll want to keep things as simple as possible. For Google, a capital letter is a different character than the lowercase version.

What about file extensions like .html?This question can be relevant if you have a website that still uses extensions like .php or .html at the end of a webpage URL.Modern web technology doesn’t require file extensions anymore. Whether your article ends in .html or with a slash (which, technically, makes it a folder), or ends without any notation at all - it really doesn’t matter. All those URL patterns work, and they can all perform just as well in Google.

Can you use parameters in article URLs?You can, but you shouldn’t. In its Publisher Center documentation concerning redirects, Google specifically advises against using the ‘?id=’ parameter in your article URLs.

Do my article URLs need a unique ID?No. This is a leftover from the early days of Google News, when there was an explicit requirement for article URLs to contain a unique ID number that was at least 3 digits long.

How long should my URL be?As long as you want, up to the rather extreme 2048-character limit built into most browsers. There’s little correlation between URL length and article performance in Google’s news ecosystem.

For almost any other purpose, changing existing URLs is generally a Bad Idea.

Over the years Google has given conflicting information about this, though recently they seem to have standardised on “no link value is lost in a redirect” which I’ll admit I’m a little skeptical of.Regardless, the advice is the same: don’t change URLs for any piece of indexed content unless you have a damn good reason to.This is why site migrations are such a trepidatious enterprise. Changing a site’s tech stack often means changing page URLs, which can cause all sorts of SEO problems especially for news publishers.