Should the date be included in news URLs

[theLotter]

My website is not a news or magazine site, but we do have a news section updated 2-3 times a week with industry related news.

We are working on a new structure for the URLs.
Should the date be included in the URL?

From this article from Google I understand that as long as we submit a news sitemap it doesnt matter whether or not numbers are included in the URL, correct?

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?topic=11665

[matbennett]

Not having the numbers would probably be less confusing than having numbers that might later duplicate.  If you can produce the news sitemaps (and keep them accurate & up to date) the unique numbers are not technically required for Google news listings.  So if they are hard to add and you are confident in your sitemaps it shouldn't be an issue.

If you are less confident in them and being listed on google news is a big deal for you then try to get them added.

[theLotter]

we may have more than one news item per day but the title would be different....

would you recommend adding these numbers, or no need and might as well leave them off?

[matbennett]

that number would work fine... as long as you only ever had 1 news item per day.

[theLotter]

We dont have wordpress so I can't work on the plugins.

Would it make sense to have a 6 digit number with the date, ie for today 072913, or would google not know to interpret that as a date?

[BlueprintMarketing]

Yes you should use numbers if you can implement a news site map correctly you will easily be found if you use these numbers. The only way you're going to do this is by using a correct news site map if you're using WordPress and I don't know if you are not I can recommend going to Yoast.com and finding an excellent news site-map

here's what Google has to say about it

Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that starts with 199 or 200, we won't be able to crawl it. Please note that this rule is waived with News sitemaps.

I would strongly suggest using a sitemap_index.xml file

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/74288

I hope I have been of help,

Thomas

[matbennett]

That is correct.  We tend to still use a unique number though - partly as a "belt and braces" approach.  The other advantage is that headlines can be updated, keep a headline relevant URL and easily redirect to the correct version.