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
-
Moz shows duplicate content, but URL's are tagged with campaign tags
Crawl diagnostics shows a lot of pages with duplicate content, but when I check the details, I see that it lists the same page but the url contains a campaign tag, so it's not really another page that is serving identical content... Is there a way to remove these pages out of the Crawl Diagnostics?
Moz Pro | | jorisbrabants0 -
How long for authority to transfer form an old page to a new page via a 301 redirect? (& Moz PA score update?)
Hi How long aproximately does G take to pass authority via a 301 from an old page to its new replacement page ? Does Moz Page Authority reflect this in its score once G has passed it ? All Best
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan3 -
Getting a URL Unaccessible on the page grader
I'm optimizing a site for a financial advisor, here is the site: http://www.mattkeenancfp.com I am getting the message "that URL is unaccessible" when I try to use the on-page grader. This is an emerald website too, I'm not sure if that has any effect on anything though.
Moz Pro | | ryanbilak0 -
In Site Explorer My Blog.URL.com Shows "No Data Available for this URL"
Why when I use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org and I'm researching our Blog.URL.com's does the tool say "No Data Available for this URL"? Example: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=blog.centurypayments.com
Moz Pro | | cfield_splashmedia.com0 -
Dynamic URL pages in Crawl Diagnostics
The crawl diagnostic has found errors for pages that do not exist within the site. These pages do not appear in the SERPs and are seemingly dynamic URL pages. Most of the URLs that appear are formatted http://mysite.com/keyword,%20_keyword_,%20key_word_/ which appear as dynamic URLs for potential search phrases within the site. The other popular variety among these pages have a URL format of http://mysite.com/tag/keyword/filename.xml?sort=filter which are only generated by a filter utility on the site. These pages comprise about 90% of 401 errors, duplicate page content/title, overly-dynamic URL, missing meta decription tag, etc. Many of the same pages appear for multiple errors/warnings/notices categories. So, why are these pages being received into the crawl test? and how to I stop it to gauge for a better analysis of my site via SEOmoz?
Moz Pro | | Visually0 -
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 -
Is there a tool to upload multiple URLs and gather statistics and page rank?
I was wondering if there is a tool out there where you can compile a list of URL resources, upload them in a CSV and run a report to gather and index each individual page. Does anyone know of a tool that can do this or do we need to create one?
Moz Pro | | Brother220 -
Looking for a tool that can pull OSE stats for a bulk amount of URLs
I know that people have developed inhouse tools with the OSE API that can analyze thousands of URLs and pull metrics like PA, inbound links, etc. I need to analyze about 80k URLs and sort them by authority and I was hoping that someone could point me to a tool that can do this or let me use their tool. I'm willing to pay for access to it. We could build it inhouse, I imagine that it would be pretty easy, but our IT resources are stretched too thin right now.
Moz Pro | | Business.com0