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.
We have our own measures of how fresh pages are, for example, the first time that our crawler saw the page; we also look at the revisiting pages, how much the content changes.
I think it’s a good idea to have URL very clearly somewhere on your page where people can find out how old the content is, but I don’t think that necessarily you should do it for Googlebot’s sake. It’s a good usability thing, but Google has its 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 those computations to figure out for ourselves.
Related posts:
- Are different sites treated differently? E.G. are blogs treated differently than e-commerce sites? Does Google attempt to figure out the context of a site or are all websites equal?
- A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency, (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content? What can be done?
- In regards to new canonicalization tag, does it make sense for large corporations to consider placing that tag on every page due to marketing tracking codes and large levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages and load balancing servers?
- Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page.html versus site.com/folder/page) have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs?
- If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?
