Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I Remove URL extentions for SEO?
-
We are having a developer design our website with Magento. I noticed the main pages such as About Us have no file extention in the URL. But the product pages have a .html file extention. I was once told to remove the file extentions.
Are there benefits to removing the .html file extension and if so, is there a way we can do this using Magento?
-
Hey here is an example of a Magento site where all pages (even statics like About-us) have been moved to the flat .html extension (example: http://www.topdjgear.com/about-topdjgear.html/)
In my opinion it is best to present a uniform URL structure sitewide and generally flat HTML files are a good thing although I also have worked on very successful eCommerce sites that used no file extension.
It is relatively easy in Magento to mod you static page to include the file extension, so in terms of lowest barrier, this is the route I would go.
-
Yes, there is some benefit since shorter URLs tend to rank better. It also future-proofs your URL if you change to a different website platform in the future that is not HTML. The file extensions are unnecessary for search engines. If you decide to change it, make sure to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs so that you retain credit for the inbound links pointing to the old URLs. (Source: the book Search Engine Optimization Secrets).
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
-
Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?
Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Missing trailing slash in URL on subpages resulting in Moz PA of 1
Even here in moz community I am noticing it. Is it really a factor to have an ending slash on the page? Does it make a difference? Our website has a homepage PA of 63, DA of 56 but all of our sub-pages are just 1 and they have been up for 4 months.
Web Design | | serverleap1 -
How to know if a wordpress theme is coded correctly for Seo
Hi, So I am curious if there is a tool to see if a site is coed properly for Google? I am running Avada, a standalone theme, yet I am also using a cache plugin. But when I search my code, its all like on one huge line. So I am curious if there is a way to verify or check if a theme is coded correctly? Thank you
Web Design | | Berner1 -
Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains
Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B. We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top. To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain. At the moment we have the structure like this: domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us and domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us. I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP? All information on this topic is more than welcome 🙂
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
WIX? is it any good for SEO
Hi people. I have just built my website www.bellagiolimousines.com.au using WIX. I am in the process of optimising for SEO, and after reading a couple of older posts i.e 2012; I read that some SEO consultants do not like WIX. However with their recent upgrades, I was hoping if anyone else has had any recent experience with WIX? I have spent a considerable amount of time building this site, and I don't want to waste anymore time in optimising it, if I am not going to receive a top 3 organic SERP. Hope to hear from someone real soon!
Web Design | | Giorgio680 -
SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images. It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?
Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices1 -
Yes or No for Ampersand "&" in SEO URLs
Hi Mozzers I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs. Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using). I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution? Thanks, Chris Captivate
Web Design | | DROIDSTERS0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0
