When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address
(aka an URL or a permalink) to the post. I've previously explained how
you can
control the words used in this hyperlink.
And a common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".
Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.
Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS
As described in setting the content of your post's permalink,
the URL given to posts publisehd in Blogger shows the year and month of
the original publication date for the post. I think this is because
Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the
features organised around the post-date.
Today, there are ways of
giving your blog a home page,
showing your posts in pages, and c
hanging the order of the posts, which let your blog be
a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.
Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of
the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it
after the words.
However
Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.
So what options are available:
If you just
don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can
change the date
before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it
something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your
RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned
date).
If you have some content where any
month-and-year are particularly irrelevant,
put it into a Page instead of a Post
- because Page URLs don't contain a date. Remember that each blog can
have no more than 20 pages, and that you need to give users a way to get
to these Pages. Also remember that they are not sent out in
your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.
The third - and least attractive - option:
accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.
Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS
Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs to make sure that each post ever published has a
unique address.
Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete
it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either
title or
customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.
Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits. The
only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique.
So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the
URL, your only option is to
delete that post, and replace it with one which has
a different publication date (don't forget to
copy the post contents before you delete it!)
For example, if you publish and find that you get
www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html
you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like
www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html
Does it really matter?
Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers Blogger URL's is a problem.
If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media
that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers,
then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be
worrying about.
On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized,
and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd
be better off
using your time to write even more good quanlity,
unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often,
instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.