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.
Ending URLs in .html versus /
-
Hi there!
Currently all the URLs on my website, even the home page, end it .html, such as http://www,consumerbase.com/index.html
Is this bad?
Is there any benefit to this?Should I remove it and just have them end with a forward slash?
If I 301 redirect the old .html URLs to the forward slash URLs, will I lose PA?Thanks!
-
As everyone else has said, it doesn't really make a difference whether you have a file/extension as part of the URL. But if you do change your URLs and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, you will lose some link equity (typically about 10%-15%); I'm not sure if this devaluation is reflected in OSE/Moz metrics.
That said, I would recommend showing the directory without a file extension (using consumerbase.com/ instead of consumerbase.com/index.html). If you change platforms in the future to something that runs off PHP or some other language, displaying .html file types might not be an option but you can always display the directory. If you set yourself up now to display without the doc type, you don't have to worry about these changes in the future as much.
-
In my experience you will generate more consistent inbound links to the root url - http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html - if you were to use that as the root (canonical) url and do the following
1. Ask anyone linking to /index.html to link to http://www.consumerbase.com/
2. Once completed, 301 redirect /index.html to http://www.consumerbase.com/Ask yourself this: how often do you see someone refer an audience to http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html?
There rarely, do - out of convenience and ease of use / standardization.
So, for sharing and for ensuring that all inbound link weight is organized at only one canonical url I would suggest you consider using http://www.consumerbase.com/ at the root.
All other pages can use use .html just fine.
Hope this helps,
Todd -
Hey there!
There's no benefit or negative effect of this either way - so there's really nothing to worry about here.
Furthermore, if you type in http://www.consumerbase.com/ you get redirected to the .html version and it's the same for internal pages. This means you've not got any problems with duplicate URLs or content.
In short, everything is in order and from an SEO point of view there's no reason to make the change - all is well! The only reason why you may want to make the change is from a user experience point of view - but I don't think visitors to your site will be concerned with .html extensions at all.
Hope this helps to put your mind at rest!
-
-
Not bad
-
Benefit only comes from a usability preference. Do you think your readers would rather see it without the html suffix? Some people think so.. I personally don't think it matters at all but a lot of people will say "shorter is better." It also maximizes your compatibility should you ever change your format from an html to an active server page or something of the sort. (i think that's pretty rare though.)
-
No you will not lose PA. 301s maintain link juice (for the most part.)
-
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
-
Ogranization Schema/Microformat for a content/brand website | Travel
Hi, One of our clients have a website specific to a place, for eg. California Tourism in which they publish local information related to tourism, blogs & other useful content. I want to understand how useful is to publish Organization Schema on such website mentioning the actual Organization, which in this case is a Travel Agency? Or any other schema would fit in for such websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ds9.tech0 -
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Primary versus secondary keyword
Hello, Can someone give a example of what primary and secondary keywords are and how to implement that in a sentence ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics2 -
URL in russian
Hi everyone, I am doing an audit of a site that currently have a lot of 500 errors due to the russian langage. Basically, all the url's look that way for every page in russian: http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/food-packaging-machines/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexrbrg
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/wood-flour-solutions/
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/cellulose-solutions/ I am wondering if this error is really caused by the server or if Google have difficulty reading the russian langage in URL's. Is it better to have the URL's only in english ?0 -
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmehta10 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0