What's the SEO impact of url suffixes?
-
Is there an advantage/disadvantage to adding an .html suffix to urls in a CMS like WordPress. Plugins exist to do it, but it seems better for the user to leave it off. What do search engines prefer?
-
After I finished work, I will dig through my history and can hopefully deliver.
Update: I spent 1 hour going through my browser history and I was not able to find it. Kinda freaks me out. Sorry.
-
I would love to see the study if you can find the link later. I agree sometimes study results conflict with prior conceptions and I have been mistaken before, but those study results really sound counter intuitive.
-
There are actually some studies that can be found on the internet that suggest that the CTR correlates with the extension shown on the SERP, namely .html is supposedly having a positive impact on the CTR of up to 200%.
I was trying hard to find the website I read it on, but on the quick I couldn't find it. It contained a "study" on it with eyetracking and it made sense.
I've personally never run a test on it, but I decided to add html to our documents by means of Mod Rewrite.
As far as search engines are concerned, it does not matter at all. But overall, the visitor should be more important and seeing that it does not negatively impact rankings, it's worth a try.
-
When possible, always remove the .html or any technology suffix such as .php, .htm, etc. A few reasons:
-
this information offers no value to users nor search engines
-
it needlessly increases the length of your URL
-
it offers hackers an additional piece of information about your web server files. You want to make the bad guys work as hard as possible
-
it helps a lot with SEO when you change technologies. There is good reason for .html pages to move to .php pages. When that change is made, all the pages on a site need to be 301'd. The entire process is a big waste of link juice for the entire site which could be avoided if the technology extension did not exist. While .html and .php pages are common today, next year .seo pages might be the popular 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
-
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Moving wordpress to it's own server
Our company wants to remove wordpress from our current windows OS server at provider 1 and move it to a new server at provider 2. Godaddy handles our DNS. I would like to have it on the same domain without masking. I would like to make a DNS entry on godaddy so that our current server and our new server can use the same URL (ie sellstuff.com). But I only want the DNS to direct traffic to our current server. The goal here is to have the new server using the same URL as the old server so nothing needs to be masked once traffic is redirected with a 301 rule in the htaccess file. But no traffic outside of the 301 rule will end up going to the new server. I would then like to edit the htaccess file on our current server to redirect to the new servers IP address when someone goes to sellstuff.com/blog. Does this make since and is it possible?
Technical SEO | | larsonElectronics0 -
Best practices when merging 2 domains with different themes and CMS's?
I have a client with 2 sites - one for an external audience and one for their ~2,000-3,000 employees. The external site (call it acme.com), built on WP with a custom theme, is pretty small. The internal site (call it acmeinternal.com) has TONS of high quality content with incredible engagement metrics, but it's built on a separate CMS with an entirely different custom theme. The problem we're trying to solve now: Can we bring the internal site over to the external domain (acme.com and acme.com/internal, for example) so that client.com can benefit from the quantity and quality of content and behavioral metrics associated with the internal content? The external and internal audiences, and the corresponding content for each, are both entirely mutually exclusive. A potential client of theirs who would come to acme.com would have no reason to visit acme.com/internal (we'd actually prefer to not provide navigation to it for them), and the internal audience would treat acme.com/internal as their landing page, and all the posts would then live at acme.com/internal/news/post-name. I'm assuming there are reasons why we couldn't have half of the site on one template using one CMS, having certain SEO tags, certain HTML structure, etc where the other half of the site is using a completely different template with a different CMS with different SEO tags, different URL structure etc? To reap the reward of the great content, would we have to essentially recreate the internal site's content on the external site's cms and template? Is it even possible for the domain authority of acme.com to improve based on the engagement on acme.com/internal/_xxxx _if there's virtually zero linking back and forth between acme.com and /internal/? Any advice would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ThinkAOR0 -
Google's Omitted Results - Attempt to De-Index
We're trying to get webpages from our QA site out of Google's index. We've inserted the NOINDEX tags. Google now shows only 3 results (down from 196,000), however, they offer a link to "show omitted results" at the bottom of the page. (A) Did we do something wrong? or (B) were we successful with our NOINDEX but Google will offer to show omitted results anyway? Please advise! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Canonical Tag on Blog - Roger says it's incorrect?
Hi I have just released a post on my blog and I wanted to check my primary keyword for the post to make sure the page scores well. However when I did the page report it showed the Canonical Rel tag was incorrect. example of link the blog is http://www.example.com/Blog/post-comment/ The Canonical tag is below What am I doing wrong, as it looks correct to me?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Possible penguin hit but then back, now what's next?
hiz, i did a little check on my site by answering the quiz at mytrafficdropped.com and there was a question about on what dates there was drop in organic. and i did checked my analytics on a top sending keyword. here is what i found. see attached image . Traffic dropped totally on April 20 to onwards. Then got back better in june, but again dropped in October, still down.. anythoughts guys ? 1Jk47.png
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
Rel cannonical on all my URL's
Hi, sorry if this question has already been asked, but I can't seem to find the correct answer. In my crawling report for the domain: http://www.wellbo.de I get rel cannonical notices. I have redirected all pages of http://wellbo.de to http://www.wellbo.de with a 301 redirect. Where is my error? Why do I get these notices? I hope the image helps. Ep7Rw.jpg
Technical SEO | | wellbo0 -
How Best to Handle 'Site Jacking' (Unauthorized Use of Someone else's Dedicated IP Address)
Anyone can point their domain to any IP address they want. I've found at least two domains (same owner) with two totally unrelated domains (to each other and to us) that are currently pointing their domains to our IP address. The IP address is on our dedicated server (we control the entire physical server) and is exclusive to only that one domain (so it isn't a virtual hosting misconfiguration issue) This has caused Google to index their two domains with duplicate content from our site (found by searching for site:www.theirdomain.com) Their site does not come up in the first 50 results though for any of the keywords we come up for so Google obviously knows THEY are the dupe content, not us (our site has been around for 12 years - much longer than them.) Their registration is private and we have not been able to contact these people. I'm not sure if this is just a mistake on the DNS for the two domains or it is someone doing this intentionally to try to harm our ranking. It has been going on for a while, so it is most likely not a mistake for two live sites as they would have noticed long ago they were pointing to the wrong IP. I can think of a variety of actions to take but I can find no information anywhere regarding what Google officially recommends doing in this situation, assuming you can't get a response. Here's my ideas. a) Approach it as a Digital Copyright Violation and go through the lengthy process of having their site taken down. Pro: Eliminates the issue. Con: Sort of a pain and we could be leaving possibly some link juice on the table? b) Modify .htaccess to do a 301 redirect from any URL not using our domain, to our domain. This means Google is going to see several domains all pointing to the same IP and all except our domain, 301 redirecting to our domain. Not sure if THAT will harm (or help) us? Would we not receive link juice then from any site out there that was linking to these other domains? Con: Google will see the context of the backlinks and their link text will not be related at all to our site. In addition, if any of these other domains pointing to our IP have backlinks from 'bad neighborhoods' I assume it could hurt us? c) Modify .htaccess to do a 404 File Not Found or 403 forbidden error? I posted in other forums and have gotten suggestions that are all over the map. In many cases the posters don't even understand what I'm talking about - thinking they are just normal backlinks. Argh! So I'm taking this to "The Experts" on SEOMoz.
Technical SEO | | jcrist1