Extension-less URLS to extension and vice versa - does it affect PA?
-
Quick question: Will adding an extension such as .html or .php to a URL affect the Page Authority?
Long explanation:
My site is built in Drupal, and has the rewrite rules in place to redirect URLs with .php extension to no extension URLs. For example, the real URL for one of my pages is: http://www.trueresults.com/index.php?q=get-started. Because of the rewrite rule, it is rewritten to http://www.trueresults.com/get-started by Drupal.
If I wanted to keep the url the same, but add an extension to the end (ie. ".html") would that affect my Page Authority? Would Google consider this an entirely new URL?
The reasoning behind this is I am working on setting up some goals and events in my analytics and it requires urls with an extension, it's not accepting my "extension-less" urls.
thanks!
-
Thanks for the feeback, based on the responses I've got, I'm going to leave them as-is (extension-less). Regarding the extensions being needed to work with my Goals setup in Google Analytics, I was having trouble getting it to work and speculated that it was due to the missing extension, but now that I know that doesn't matter. I can figure out what the "real" issue is. thanks!
-
Extensionless URLs are a good idea because it helps with unavoidable future platform transitions. If you switch server technologies, you might end pages in .jsp or .html or something else.
Search engines generally consider every character when determining separate URLs. This goes for adding .html and even capital letters. Therefore, these two URLs are different in the eyes of search engines:
But to really answer your question, adding an extension should have little to no effect on page authority. Search engines are more concerned with your page's content, relevancy, popularity, authority, etc.
-
To answer your question, if you use appropriate 301 redirects this should not affect your PA.
However you should not need to do this to facilitate your analytics. Why won't it work with an extension?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are AMP pages affecting mobile search visibility?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I've recently seen a fairly hefty drop in search visibility on Google mobile, from 12.8% to 4.1%. Desktop visibility is unaffected. The same search visibility drop is echoed in SEMRush. However, Google Analytics shows that our site traffic from mobile hasn't changed. The only thing I can think of is that we recently launched AMP pages. I know Google sometimes caches AMPs so they’re served off google domains. Could that mean that the cached version of the page is ranking rather than our own? That would explain the drop in visibility but stable traffic I think?! What other explanation could it be? Many thanks in advance, Kit
Moz Pro | | KitSmith0 -
How long do changes in title tags take to affect SEO?
This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro. I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway. I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.
Moz Pro | | AliMac260 -
DA AND PA estimation based on Backlink or search engine traffic??
I'm want to know that estimation of blogs DA and PA based on search engine traffic(google,yahoo,bing) or it totally depend on link connected to that perticular domain.
Moz Pro | | imDelu0 -
My index URL was removed from Google, but all others remain in the search engines
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Couple of weeks back we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. It used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Moz Pro | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Why does it keep displaying br tags and claiming 404 errors on like 4 of my URL's for all my Wordpress sites?
Is anyone else having the same issue? These errors don't actually exist and i think it has something to do with wordpress - how can i fix this?
Moz Pro | | MillerPR0 -
Handling long URLs and overly-dynamic URLs on eCommerce site
Hello Forum, I've been optimizing an eCommerce site and our SEOmoz crawls are favorable for the most part, except for long URLs and overly-dynamic URLs. These issues stem from two URL types: Layered navigation (faceted search) and non-Google internal search results. I outline the issues for each below. We use an SEO-friendly URL structure for our product category pages, but once bots start "clicking" our layered navigation options, all the parameters are appended to our SEO-friendly urls, causing the SEOmoz crawl warnings. Layered Navigation :
Moz Pro | | pano
SEO-Friendly Category Page: oursite.com/shop/meditation-cushions.html Effects of layered navigation: oursite.com/shop/meditation-cushions.html?bolster_material_quality=414&bolsters_appearance=206&color=12&dir=asc&height=291&order=name As you can see the parameters include product attributes and page sorts. I should note that all pages generated by these parameters use the element to point back to the SEO-friendly URL We have also set up Google's Webmaster Tools to handle these parameters. Internal Search Function:
Our URLs start off simple: oursite.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=brown. Then the bot clicks all the layered navigation options, yielding oursite.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?appearance=54&cat=67&clothing_material=83&color=12&product_color=559&q=brown. Also, all search results are set to noindex,follow. My question is: Should we worry about these overly-dynamic and long ULR warnings? We have set up canonical elements, "noindex,follow" solutions, and configured Webmaster Tools to handle our parameters. If these are a concern, how would you resolve these issues?0 -
Why do pages with canonical urls show in my report as a "Duplicate Page Title"?
eg: Page One
Moz Pro | | DPSSeomonkey
<title>Page one</title>
No canonical url Page Two
<title>Page one</title> Page two is counted as being a page with a duplicate page title.
Shouldn't it be excluded?0 -
4xx (not found) errors seem spurious, caused by a "\" added to the URL
Hi SEOmoz folks We're getting a lot of 404 (not found) errors in our weekly crawl. However the weird thing is that the URLs in question all have the same issue. They are all a valid URL with a backsalsh ("") added. In URL encoding, this is an extra %5C at the end of the URL. Even weirder, we do not have any such URLs in our (Wordpress-based) website. Any insight on how to get rid of this issue? Thanks
Moz Pro | | GPN0