.html extension
-
My new client's original web developer set up many pages with .html extensions. My plan is to turn most of these into php pages. Also, I think the .html extension displaying in the browser is just ugly so I want to drop the .html extension from those pages that remain. I know how to do this with .htaccess, but my question is should I 301 redirect all the .html pages to the page without an extension. (For example, should I redirect www.example.com/page.html to www.example.com/page)
I don't know how many, in any, links there are out there to these pages, but I'm guessing not many. I'm sure it's not that big a deal but I was wondering if it would be worth the time to do that for the pages I change.
-
Thanks Thomas but this site only uses wordpress for the blog. The rest of the site is what I'm concerned with right now.
-
-
Great! I think I'll give that a whirl.
-
Absolutely! You can do a blanket "301 any page with .html at the end to the same page without it" rule with .htaccess to save you time and energy once you've done your renaming process.
This neat little bit of code (found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url) should do the trick nicely.
<code>RewriteEngineOnRewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d RewriteRule^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]</code>
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
-
Html extensions
I have remodeled an old html site using wordpress. I see some instructions in wordpress that says I can add an .html extension to some of the pages, but it looks pretty complicated. Is there any benefit in going through that hassle? or should I just ask my web guy to rewrite via htaccess | https://sacramentotop10.com/Weddings/Dresses.html | https://sacramentotop10.com/Weddings/Dresses.html becomes https://sacramentotop10.com/weddings/dresses
Technical SEO | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Why HTML entities gets crawled as content keywords in Google search console?
My Google search console shows HTML parameters such as div, class, img, src, gif, align as content keywords, but why google crawls HTML parameters as keywords? because of this, I would be losing traffic for my on-page content keywords. Please let me know how to solve this. Thanks, Jenifer
Technical SEO | | Jenifer300 -
Will presentational HTML tags actually be having a negative SEO effect?
Hi All, I have been using some scanning tools as usual and I keep getting notified about presentational HTML. I'm not involved in the web design but if this is actually having a negative effect then we need to get it changed. Can anyone advise? "pages of this website were found to use presentational HTML elements and/or attributes. It is widely regarded that use of presentational HTML like and should be avoided."
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Does a GTLD extension 'count' as part of the target keyword?
Hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me. Reading about GTLDs, I came across this quote from TSO Host: 'What we don’t know is whether an extension can double up as a keyword, which is picked up by Google and treated identically to the rest of a domain name. I.e. - would ‘bristolguitars.music’ have more ranking potential than ‘bristolguitars.com’ as ‘music’ is a relevant search word?' Source: https://www.tsohost.com/blog/how-do-new-gtlds-affect-seo Does anyone know if a GTLD extension does double up as a keyword? For example, if Nike buys 'Nike.shoes', does this double as the keyword 'Nike shoes', or is Google and other search engines just looking at the domain name _before _the GTLD extension? I'm looking at .photography for examples (not my niche) and seeing folks are having mixed results ranking for 'Keyword + Photography', so would be keen to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | ecommercebc0 -
HTML Encoding Error
Okay, so this is driving me nuts because I should know how to find and fix this but for the life of me cannot. One of the sites I work for has a long-standing crawl error in Google WMT tools for the URL /a%3E that appears on nearly every page of the site. I know that a%3E is an improperly encoded > but I can't seem to find where exactly in the code its coming from. So I keep putting it off and coming back to it every week or two only to wrack my brain and give up on it after about an hour (since its not a priority and its not really hurting anything). The site in question is https://www.deckanddockboxes.com/ and some of the pages it can be found on are /small-trash-can.html, /Dock-Step-Storage-Bin.html, and /Standard-Dock-Box-Maxi.html (among others). I figured it was about time to ask for another set of eyes to look at this for me. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Pages extensions
Hi guys, We're in the process of moving one of our sites to a newer version of the CMS. The new version doesn't support page extensions (.aspx) but we'll keep them for all existing pages (about 8,000) to avoid redirects. The technical team is wondering about the new pages - does it make any difference if the new pages are without extensions, except for usability? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
Backlinks go to "example.com" our homepage is "example.com/default.html" am I losing internal link power?
Hey everyone! Thanks again for everybodies contributions to my questions over the last few months. As the title states, our homepage is at "example.com/default.html" but everybody that backlinks to us (as expected) to "example.com" does that mean that I am probably losing a lot of the power of my links??
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Duplicate content issue index.html vs non index.html
Hi I have an issue. In my client's profile, I found that the "index.html" are mostly authoritative than non "index.html", and I found that www. version is more authoritative than non www. The problem is that I find the opposite situation where non "index.html" are more authoritative than "index.html" or non www more authoritative than www. My logic would tell me to still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html". Am I right? and in the case I find the opposite happening, does it matter if I still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html"? The same question for www vs non www versions? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0