SEO .html, .php or nothing

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Should I use a file extension or not?

Hi Guys,

When I make a site, should I use the .php extension, rewrite it to .html or just remove it (.htaccess)? What's your opinion about this?

I've always learnt that it was .html, but I don't know why. I doubt it that google doesn't care, but why should .html prefered to no extension?

Solution 1

If you have "pretty" URLs (e.g. "http://www.example.com/profile/charly-sheen"), you don't want to have the extension, because it will reduce the weight of the other keywords in the URL (in this case: "profile", "charly" and "sheen"). If there were a ".php" in the end, "php" would most likely take some weight away from the other keywords. So yeah, you want to make your URLs as short as possible and remove everything word that you don't expect users to search for.

If you don't have "pretty" URLs (e.g. "http://www.example.com/profile.php?id=12345"), the .php doesn't matter, because your URL is crap anyway, both from a SEO as well as a user experience perspective.

Solution 2

Remove it. It serves no purpose, other than letting the user know which technology you would like him to believe you used to create the page. Cool URIs don't change. After the third change in page generation technology, you do not want to have a mix of .html, .php, .aspx URLs; and you actually just decided to switch to the new and promising Foogen 3.v, adding a new file extension .foog to your portfolio.

Do not remove it for the sake of SEO. Remove it for the sake of consistency and for the sake of people linking to your site (which, on the other hand, happens to be a part of SEO nowadays).

Solution 3

Actually, it's doesn't matter (.html or .php or .asp bla bla bla ) . But you can rewrite URL completely.

For example : http://www.example.com/member.php TO http://www.example.com/member/

Users (and maybe Google?) more like this URL method.

Comments

[Admin]

not extensions but query string is the thing that matters. Absence of query string to be certain.

[Admin]

Few SEO believe that "it does matter, .html is better for article directoy, etc". However, I am personally against it. Can those of you who answered, please give a citation / source / link which has a research on this and fairly establishes that, "it does NOT matter". It will help me convince those SEOs.

[Eray]

I'm really wondering, why you vote negative ?

[Admin]

+1 hiding extension. The users or search engines don't care what language you're using.

[Jordi Tost]

why google likes it more, and where have you seen an average user who even notice an address bar, not to mention whatever it's contents?

[jgradim]

@Eray, Few SEO believe that "it does matter". However, I am personally against it. Can you please give a citation / source / link which has a research on this and fairly establishes that, "it does NOT matter". It will help me convince those SEOs.

[Eray]

@Shrapnel , Google more like /member/eray/ than member.php?user=eray . Did you really think, this is bad suggestion ?

[Eray]

@shamittomar, maybe when extension is .html, Google thinks "this page is static" . And if ext. is .php , thinks "This page is dinamic" . What about /member/eray/ ? What Google think ?

[jgradim]

@kemp, Few SEO believe that "it does matter". However, I am personally against it. Can you please give a citation / source / link which has a research on this and fairly establishes that, "it does NOT matter". It will help me convince those SEOs.