Removing extension
-
Hi there, I have thousands of pages that use the extension .php and thought about cleaning these URLs up for example rather than www.mysite.com/trainers/adidias/samba.php I could have have www.mysite.com/trainers/adidas/samba/ is it worth changing?
Currently driving around 1 million visits to the website each month from organic search and slightly concerned it could have a negative impact on my rankings.
Thanks for any help.
-
Hey Paul,
What is the main reason of removing the extension? If you already have SEO+user friendly link structure and getting good organic traffic, I don't think you should mess around with anything. As this .php is really better than scary dynamic codes in URLs.
The thing is, this change can cause you a massive traffic and ranking drop. If you can take that risk, all you have to do is to make redirection of every link and update your sitemaps. And when you're doing this, make sure to launch aggressive campaigns to maintain the flow of traffic.
Hope this helps!
Umar
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
-
Removing site subdomains from Google search
Hi everyone, I hope you are having a good week? My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages. I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this. The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google. In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
Should we remove category paths for better SEO?
We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables". Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html Would removing the category paths help? Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest? The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic? Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Domain Types/Extensions – Are .infos any good ?
Hi I know general concensus is to stay away from the non established domain suffix types and concentrate on .coms .co.uk’s etc etc. But i have an aged .info domain that has some content on it related to a online news paper i have on that subject (on the news paper providers domain sub-folder currently) which i want to focus more time on and put on its own dedicated domain. So i want to upload it to this aged .info domain. However waste of time if .info domains are bad for seo etc Does anyone have any experience of .info doing well in serps or should i totally scrap the idea and try find a new .com etc type domain ? My .info has been live with related content for 7 years so hoping that should count for something 🙂 All Best
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan0 -
How should we handle re-directory links? Should we remove these links?
We are currently cleaning up bad links that were purchased by a previous SEO agency. We have found links on anonym.to pages that redirect traffic to our site automatically. How should this be handled? Should we remove these links?
Technical SEO | | Lorne_Marr0 -
Site removed from Google Index
Hi mozers, Two months ago we published http://aquacion.com We registered it in the Google Webmaster tools and after a few day the website was in the index no problem. But now the webmaster tools tell us the URLs were manually removed. I've look everywhere in the webmaster tools in search for more clues but haven't found anything that would help me. I sent the acces to the client, who might have been stupid enough to remove his own site from the Google index, but now, even though I delete and add the sitemap again, the website won't show in Google SERPs. What's weird is that Google Webmaster Tools tells us all the page are indexed. I'm totally clueless here... Ps. : Added screenshots from Google Webmaster Tools. Update Turns out it was my mistake after all. When my client developped his website a few months ago, he published it, and I removed the website from the Google Index. When the website was finished I submited the sitemap, thinking it would void the removal request, but it don't. How to solve In webmaster tools, in the [Google Index => Remove URLs] page, you can reinclude pages there. tGib0
Technical SEO | | RichardPicard0 -
My site was Not removed from google, but my most visited page was. what does that mean?
Help. My most important page http://hoodamath.com/games/ has disappeared from google, why the rest of my site still remains. i can't find anything about this type of ban. any help would be appreciated ( i would like to sleep tonight)
Technical SEO | | hoodamath0 -
Speed up the process of removing URLs from Google Index
Hi guys, We have done some work to try to remove pages from Google index. We have done the following: 1. Noindex tag 2. Make pages returning a 404 response. Is there anyway to notify Google about these changes so we can speed up the process of removing these pages from Google index? Also regarding the URL removal tool, Google says that it's used to remove URLs from search results, does it mean the URLs are removed from their index too? Many thanks guys David
Technical SEO | | sssrpm0 -
Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0