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Urls with or without .html ending
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Hello,
Can anyone show me some authority info on wheher links are better with or without a .html ending?
Thanks is advance
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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.
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I agree with all three of your guys - make it as clean as you possibly can.

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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.
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Generally the shorter the URL the better - both from an indexing & usability perspectives..
Also, shorter URLs attract higher click-thru rates

Further discussion/reading:
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As a user, I prefer the URLs without. Â 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
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