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
-
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 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
PDF or HTML Page?
One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page. The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents. My thoughts were why not make it a pdf? Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page? If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well? The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0