Is there a way to remove the date part from a blogger URL?

Question

Blog posts on blogger.com always have the date in the URL, e.g. http://myblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-awesome-blogpost.html.

I'd like to get rid of the date part in the URL slug. Is there any way to set this option? I wasn't able to find it.

And if not, does anyone know the decision from Google why to keep the date in there? I mean, for most "normal" blog posts it makes totally sense, however, especially on technical blogs you might update the blog posts a couple of months later and bump the date to the current day, however, the date in the URL still remains the old one. Of course you can always create a new blog post and copy & paste the old content, however, that would break all the links pointing to the old blog post.

Answer 1

No, you cannot change it.

If you do choose to create a new post and move the old content (best done by copy/pasting the HTML), then you could set up a custom re-direct from the old post to the new one, using the features recently introduced for this.

Sometimes I just keep the old post, and put a note at the top saying to see XXX for an update. This is nice if the old answer was key-word rich, but the new one is so simple and elegant that you can't relatistcally work the keywords into the post.

Update: this question, and a couple of posts in the Blogger product-forum, inspired me to write up a fuller answer. In case it's interesting to future readers, you can find it here: http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/take-numbers-out-of-blog-post-web-address-urls.html