Building a solid blog that Google wants to rank highly is not easy task to start with but it’s made much harder by blog content management systems being designed using every SEO faux pas you can think of apart from Flash.

Most people have now figured out the obvious tips such as improving your url structure to include keywords, adding a unique title and meta description to each page and preventing indexing of noise pages such as comment feeds.

However lots of bloggers are still falling into a major SEO and usability trap – date based archives. When was the last time you visited a blog and browsed their date based archives? I’ve certainly never done it. The thing to remember about blogging is that maybe 90% of the content is time sensitive. If you want to read about internet marketing or some new product launch that’s great but the information is likely to be out of date in a couple of months. I certainly would never want to look back at something you wrote back in 2006 unless I knew what the post was about and that’s where the date based archives become even more useless. You can’t find a post by topic so you need to know what date it was published. How many of you remember the date another blogger published a post?

Date based archives are not just useless from a usability point of view they don’t help your SEO either. As well as possible duplicate content issues if you publish full posts in your archives the main issue is that the pages are full of unrelated content. If you group all your posts about the iPhone together on one page Google can see that the page is related to the iPhone and each post will rank higher because of it. When you group 30 posts from January 2006 together on a page Google just sees it as a page of unrelated content.

If you really want to see how well used your category pages are just check your stats software. How many people look at them? Where did those people come from? How many people who recently read an old post from 2006 found it via your archives?