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.
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
-
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first.
I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs.
For example
website.com/category/sub-category.html
Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/
We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings.
By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category?
Second question:
If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case.
For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category
Duplicate content/pages?
-
Similarly to any link, not just 301:
"The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link."
So 301s are just fine.
-
Matt Cutts said, in 2013, that about 15% of pagerank is lost through a 301 redirect.
-
Thanks for the speedy answer, I had suspected the same thing so I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion. Thanks for your help.
-
Hi Joshua
subcategory.htm pages will perform just as well as subcategory/ and having .htm in the URL doesn't affect link juice flow at all. .htm or .html are perfectly valid HTML files; however, some prefer having shorter, "nicer" looking URLs. If this is the case and the website is still in the early stages of SEO, then 301 redirect the .htm URLs and make sure every navigation elements links to the non-htm URLs in the future.
In some cases, the slash ending URLs can be considered duplicate pages (even though I'm pretty sure Google will understand the honest mistake), so it's one of the basic SEO recommendations to set redirections and make sure the website navigation doesn't mix the two. Also, SEO tools will keep sending you duplicate page title warnings, so it's better to clean it up as soon as possible.
Hope it helps.
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
-
How recovering the ranking after an hacking
Hello, I'm Alexia and a few months ago (end of March) my site has been hacked: hackers have created more than 30.000 links in Japanese to sell tires. I've successfully removed the hack and after 14 days of struggle even decided to change the domain to Siteground as they've been really keen to help. I still have some problems and I desperately need your tips. In search console, Google is informing about the +30.000 404 errors due to the content created by hackers which is not available anymore. I've been advised to redirect those links to 410 as they might have penalty effects in the SERP I have 50 503 server errors recognised by Google back in April but still there. What should I do to solve them? I still have a lot of traffic from Japan, even if I've removed all the content and ask Googled to disavow spamming backlinks. Do you think I have on page keywords? I don't understand how they can still find me. Those KWs are indexed in analytics, but not effective clicks, as the content is not there anymore. I also asked Google to remove links in search console with the tool removing links but not all of my requests have been accepted. My site disappeared from the organic results even if it hasn't been recognised as hacked in Google (there wasn't any manual actions on the Search Console). What can I do to gain the organic positioning once again? I've just tried to use the “Fetch as Google” option on search console for the entire website. Thank you all and I look forward to your replies. Thanks! Alessia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlessiaCamera0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
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 -
Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix gives me this result from Google: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended. I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.0 -
Strange URLs, how do I fix this?
I've just check Majestic and have seen around 50 links coming from one of my other sites. The links all look like this: http://www.dwww.mysite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
http://www.eee.mysite.com
http://www.w.mysite.com The site these links are coming from is a html site. Any ideas whats going on or a way to get rid of these urls? When I visit the strange URLs such as http://www.dwww.mysite.com, it shows the home page of http://www.mysite.com. Is there a way to redirect anything like this back to the home page?0 -
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 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0