A person from New York asked, “Do dates in the URL of blogs or websites help determine freshness of the content or is it largely ignored?” Google Engineer Matt Cutts sheds light on the matter through the following video.
Matt acknowledges the value of having the date of posting on the URL from a usability standpoint. However, Google engineers are aware that this can be easily manipulated in order to appear fresh all the time. He makes it clear that they have developed several ways to gauge how recent a certain page is and their methods do not rely on the date written on the address or posted on the site itself. Rather, they depend on things like the timestamp of the crawler’s first visit and the frequency of page changes monitored over time.
In his opinion, dated URLs are excellent features that enhanced a site’s user-friendliness and so they are highly encouraged for this reason. Webmasters need not worry about it though if all they are after is a prominent search ranking due to freshness. The Google search engine will be able to figure out the proper score for various competing sites independently through sophisticated computations involving trusted markers.
Video Link:
Do dates in URLs determine freshness? –