Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
-
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first.
I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs.
For example
website.com/category/sub-category.html
Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/
We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings.
By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category?
Second question:
If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case.
For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category
Duplicate content/pages?
-
Similarly to any link, not just 301:
"The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link."
So 301s are just fine.
-
Matt Cutts said, in 2013, that about 15% of pagerank is lost through a 301 redirect.
-
Thanks for the speedy answer, I had suspected the same thing so I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion. Thanks for your help.
-
Hi Joshua
subcategory.htm pages will perform just as well as subcategory/ and having .htm in the URL doesn't affect link juice flow at all. .htm or .html are perfectly valid HTML files; however, some prefer having shorter, "nicer" looking URLs. If this is the case and the website is still in the early stages of SEO, then 301 redirect the .htm URLs and make sure every navigation elements links to the non-htm URLs in the future.
In some cases, the slash ending URLs can be considered duplicate pages (even though I'm pretty sure Google will understand the honest mistake), so it's one of the basic SEO recommendations to set redirections and make sure the website navigation doesn't mix the two. Also, SEO tools will keep sending you duplicate page title warnings, so it's better to clean it up as soon as possible.
Hope it helps.
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
-
Full title in url
Hi to all, what is the best url structure, to have all words in the url or to tweak url like Yoast suggest? If we remove some words from url , not focus keyword but stop words and other keywords to have shorter url will that impact search rankings? example.com/one-because-two-for-three-on-four - long url, moz crawl error, yoast red light example.com/one-two-three-four - moz ok, yoast ok Where one is a focus keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki0 -
Not ranking in Google - why???
This will be a bit long, so please bare with me. I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico. My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts. I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank. My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever. My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site. Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
301 Redirected url to new subdomain, now the rank appears to be completely gone...
In an attempt to not feel bad for not blogging, I set up a new subdomain on my site to have a "coming soon" style page and "best of" section for my blog and video show properties. All the pages on the relaunch subdomain are done in Unbounce. http://relaunch.tommy.ismy.name The idea was that I would then take the pages on my regular domain, and one by one create landing pages that test out new design ideas (instead of going into full production web design) and redirect the traffic from the top ranked pages to the new, redesigned pages. At first, I set up the 301 through a plugin in wordpress and for the first week or so it was great. As far as I know, I did set my canonical tags up properly on that page too. However, just a couple days ago, I wasn't getting the same traffic, and my top ranked keyword that accounts for over half my traffic is nowhere to be found in at least the first 15 pages of search results. Which stinks, because I've maintained that rank for well over 2 years 😞 Clearly, something I did wasn't liked by Google, and I wonder, what did I do "wrong" and is there anything I could do to get that rank back?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thomas_m_walker0 -
URL for offline purposes
Hi there, We are going to be promoting one of our products offline, however I do not want to use the original URL for this product page as it's long for the user to type in, so I thought it would be best practice in using a URL that would be short, easier for the consumer to remember. My plan: Replicate the product page and put it on this new short URL, however this would mean I have a duplicate content issue, would It be best practice to use a canonical on the new short URL pointing to the original URL? or use a 301? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Yahoo rankings anomaly?
Two days ago I went from ranking outside the top 50 to ranking #1 and #4 for two great terms on Yahoo. Now two days later I don't rank in the top 50 again. I sure wish I knew what that blip on the radar was all about. It would be great to get ranked again. Seems like a mystery. I have not heard of this happening on Yahoo before. Maybe it was a problem with the open link explorer? Anyone see this happen before? Thank you, Boodreaux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
My URLs are a mess!
Hi all, I am having some SEO done on my website and I have been asked to tidy up my URLs. They show the word 'brand' or 'item' and an ID number in every one. http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/brand/Girl-Skateboards/153/ http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/item/Girl%20Skateboards%20Guy%20Mariano%20OG%20Guy%20Skateboards/898/ My developer says that we cannot remove these words as they 'form part of a routing table' for each url. How do I fix these URLs? Many thanks in advance. Paul.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul530 -
URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0