Best way to use date in URL for better SEO

Question

There is a website scenario in which a user gives date as input and the result will be something related with that date.

Lets take the scenario is my website gives earth quakes happened in Europe on a particular date. Lets say below is the a result page of earth quakes happened in europe on 28-12-1994.

www.geography.com/earth-quakes-in-europe-on/28-12-1994

I am sure about the sentence part of my URL (earth-quakes-in-europe-on) is correct as per SEO standard. My question is can the date be decoded by Google correctly if somebody searches in Google

"earths quakes in europe on 28-12-1994" 
"earths quakes in europe on 28/12/1994"
"earths quakes in europe on December 28, 1994" 

Will my URL be decoded correctly and shown in Google result as per the query?

Answer 1

There is no particular SEO benefit from having the date in the URL. Search engines may certainly parse the date to know when an article was first created, but equally if the date is on the page they would use that.

I'm trying not to use dates in URLs because I'm not running blogs or any similar service. In my personal opinion, link is better without date.

On the other part...

Dates convey irrelevant information

If your file structure uses dates as folders in the URLs, that puts low relevancy data (the date) before the more relevant category name and individual file name. If your keywords are in your filename they may be bolded by the search engine, which would make your URL appear more relevant to searchers. Just like with the page title, I believe the earlier you have highly relevant data in the filename, the easier it will be for it to stick out to a searcher scanning the search results.

Dates suggest old, stale news

While your year-old content may be fresher than anything else ranking at the top of Google’s search result, if you are the only one who places a date in your URL people may think your content is old and stale, especially since Google puts fresh cache dates in many search results. This could also result in a lower click through rate.

Dates can cause robots.txt errors

If you find that you would prefer to keep category and individual post pages indexed but you want to filter out monthly archives, it is easy to accidentally block some of your other content pages if they have the dates in the URLs as well.

Source:
http://searchengineland.com/four-reasons-to-avoid-using-dates-in-urls-13152

Answer 2

One of the primary places Google looks for a date for any given page is in the URL. If a date is found in the URL, it is considered to be a strong indicator over most if not all other sources including within the response header.

From this answer: How to tell how old a page is?

4] Google looks for a date within the URL. It looks for the following formats; YYYMMDDHH - YYYY - YYYYMM.

These may not be the only formats, but after a lot of research at the time the question was asked and answered, there was little to go on that was solid.

The URL is one of the strongest semantic clues for search engines just behind the title tag and before any link text. It is an important factor and part of the blended SERP result set before filter analysis is applied. A good URL/URI (domain name/path - these are really two separate entities) can really boost the opportunity to have a page found providing that it meets certain semantic standards.

As far as where along the URL to place the date, there are some criteria that need to be considered. Mostly the question is how important is the date and where along the line does it make sense to include it? If for example, you are organizing by date, then the date should come first. Of course that is a no brainer. But if you are talking about celebrity birthdays, then the organization could be celebrity/birthday/date. This would allow for other structures such as celebrity/died/date. This structure is least specific to more specific from left to right.

This answer gives a lot of information on that: Well structured URLs vs. URLs optimized for SEO