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.
Urls with or without .html ending
-
Hello,
Can anyone show me some authority info on wheher links are better with or without a .html ending?
Thanks is advance
-
Another advantage of not having a technology extension is that if you change technologies and go from .html to .asp, you don't have to change all of your URLs and worry about redirects and lost link juice.
-
I agree with all three of your guys - make it as clean as you possibly can.

-
I totally agree with John and Woj. Clean, short , crisp and to the point url's is what you should be striving for. HTMLextension is a preference but not a law.
-
Generally the shorter the URL the better - both from an indexing & usability perspectives..
Also, shorter URLs attract higher click-thru rates

Further discussion/reading:
-
As a user, I prefer the URLs without. Looking at the SEOMoz 2011 Rankings, longer URLs correlate to worse rankings, so do yourself and your users a favor and save them 5 characters.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-8
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
-
Why add .html to WordPress pages?
A site I may take over has a plugin that adds .html to the pages. I searched online but I’ve only found how to add it rather than why to add it. Is it needed? If I remove it, I’ll have to be careful with SEO / indexed pages and redirects. The site is running 3.x.x and 90% of the plugins have not been updated in over 5 years including this one. Before I update to 4.7.x, I am trying to understand the landscape (pros / cons) on why something could be used and if I need to find a suitable replacement for it.
Technical SEO | | acktivate2 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL
Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
Should the date be included in news URLs
My website is not a news or magazine site, but we do have a news section updated 2-3 times a week with industry related news. We are working on a new structure for the URLs.
Technical SEO | | theLotter
Should the date be included in the URL? From this article from Google I understand that as long as we submit a news sitemap it doesnt matter whether or not numbers are included in the URL, correct? https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?topic=116650 -
Mobile URL parameter (Redirection to desktop)
Hello, We have a parallel mobile website and recently we implemented a link pointing to the desktop website. This redirect is happening via a javascript code and results in a url followed by this paramenter: ?m=off Example:
Technical SEO | | echo1
http://www.m.website.com redirects to:
http://www.website.com/?m=off Questions: Will the "http://www.website.com/?m=off" be considered duplicate content with "http://www.website.com" since they both return the same content? Is there any possibility that Google will take into consideration the url ending in "/?m=off"? How should we treat this new url? The webmaster tools URL parameter configuration at the moment isn't experiencing problems but should we submit the parameter anyway in order not to be indexed or should we wait first and see the error response? In case we should submit this for removal... what's the best way to do it? Like this? Parameter: ?m=off Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - doesn't affect page content Any help is much appreciated.
Thank you!0 -
Special characters in URL
Hi There, We're in the process of changing our URL structure to be more SEO friendly. Right now I'm struggling to find a good way to handle slashes that are part of a targeted keyword. For example, if I have a product page and my product title is "1/2 ct Diamond Earrings in 14K Gold" which of the following URLs is the right way to go if I'm targeting the product title as the search keyword? example.com/jewelry/1-2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/12-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/1_2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/1%2F2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Richline_Digital0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Ok to Put a Decimal in a URL?
I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement. For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like: http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?
Technical SEO | | CodyWheeler0