Yes, for content meant to last, dates in URLs are a liability, and the recommendation for evergreen pages is dateless slugs. A date baked into the URL makes the page look dated to anyone who reads the address, and it creates a trap when you update the content. Either you leave a 2023 stamp on a piece you refreshed this year, which signals staleness, or you change the slug to update the date and trigger a redirect and a re-crawl. Both outcomes are worse than simply not putting a date in the URL in the first place.
The first cost is perception. A visible year in a URL tells readers, and arguably search engines, roughly how old the page is, and for evergreen content that is exactly the wrong message. A guide meant to stay relevant for years looks outdated the moment its URL carries an old year, regardless of how current the actual content is. People hesitate to click a result whose URL reads like it was written several years ago, even when the page itself is fully up to date.
The second cost is the maintenance trap. Evergreen content gets updated, that is the point of it, and a dated URL forces a choice at every update. Keep the old date and the URL undercuts the freshness of the revision, or change the slug to reflect the new date and now you have a URL change, which means a 301 redirect, a re-crawl, and the settling period any slug change brings. You have turned a routine content refresh into a small migration, purely because the date is in the address.
The dateless slug avoids all of it. A URL built around the topic alone stays accurate no matter how many times you update the content, never looks stale, and never needs changing just because the calendar moved. The date, where it matters at all, belongs in the visible content or metadata, where you can update it freely without touching the URL.
When you publish evergreen content, use a slug built on the topic with no year or date in it, and keep any date you want to show in the page body or its published and updated fields. Reserve dated URLs for genuinely time-bound content like news, where the date is part of the page’s identity.