undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
    Moz Pro

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

    Try it free!
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. What's the SEO impact of url suffixes?

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.

What's the SEO impact of url suffixes?

Technical SEO
3
5
5.1k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia last edited by Oct 15, 2011, 12:21 AM

    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?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • dumperama
      dumperama @RyanKent last edited by Oct 16, 2011, 5:04 AM Oct 15, 2011, 5:03 AM

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • RyanKent
        RyanKent @dumperama last edited by Oct 15, 2011, 3:18 AM Oct 15, 2011, 3:18 AM

        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.

        dumperama 1 Reply Last reply Oct 15, 2011, 5:03 AM Reply Quote 0
        • dumperama
          dumperama last edited by Oct 15, 2011, 3:14 AM Oct 15, 2011, 3:13 AM

          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.

          RyanKent 1 Reply Last reply Oct 15, 2011, 3:18 AM Reply Quote 0
          • RyanKent
            RyanKent last edited by Oct 17, 2011, 4:05 PM Oct 15, 2011, 12:42 AM

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • 1 / 1
            1 out of 5
            • First post
              1/5
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • DML-Tampa

              New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO

              New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?

              Technical SEO | Sep 1, 2016, 11:39 AM | DML-Tampa
              0
            • One2OneDigital

              My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?

              I have built a new website and have redirected all my old URL's to their new ones but for some reason Google is still indexing the old URL's. Also, the page authority for all of my pages has dropped to 1 (apart from the homepage) but before they were between 12 to 15. Can anyone help me with this?

              Technical SEO | Mar 30, 2015, 11:39 AM | One2OneDigital
              0
            • ey_sja

              How Does Dynamic Content for a Specific URL Impact SEO?

              Example URL:  http://www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy Dog Services/default.aspx The above page is generated dynamically depending on what province the visitor visits from.  For example, a visitor from BC would see something quite different than a visitor from Nova Scotia; the intent is that the information shown should be relevant to the user of that province. How does this effect SEO?  How (or from what location) does Googlebot decide to crawl the page? I have considered a subdirectory for each province, though that comes with its challenges as well.  One such challenge is duplicate content when different provinces may have the same information for some pages.  Any suggestions for this?

              Technical SEO | Nov 17, 2014, 5:11 PM | ey_sja
              0
            • hammadrafique

              Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?

              I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png

              Technical SEO | Oct 15, 2014, 8:05 AM | hammadrafique
              0
            • AZWebWorks

              Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.

              I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!

              Technical SEO | Jul 6, 2012, 11:45 AM | AZWebWorks
              0
            • A_Q

              Blank pages in Google's webcache

              Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
              Elias

              Technical SEO | Mar 5, 2012, 10:33 AM | A_Q
              0
            • lzhao

              Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?

              We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.)   So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha

              Technical SEO | Jul 15, 2011, 11:24 AM | lzhao
              0
            • DanHill

              A question about RSS feeds and nofollow's

              With the nofollow tag used very widely on the internet these days I was just wondering about how an RSS feed might help me find a way around it.  Basically my question is this : I post a comment on a blog, it's approved and my comment together with my link(nofollow tag applied) is there. Now when the blogs RSS feed updates, does this nofollow tag get applied to the feed? As far as I can tell it does not - but I'm not too clue'd up on how the feed is generated. Anyone want to help me understand how it works and if what I'm suggesting would be 'a way around the nofollow tag' ? Thanks 🙂

              Technical SEO | Apr 21, 2011, 5:41 AM | DanHill
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.