Extension-less URLS to extension and vice versa - does it affect PA?

[TrueResults]

Quick question: Will adding an extension such as .html or .php to a URL affect the Page Authority?

Long explanation:

My site is built in Drupal, and has the rewrite rules in place to redirect URLs with .php extension to no extension URLs.  For example, the real URL for one of my pages is: http://www.trueresults.com/index.php?q=get-started.  Because of the rewrite rule, it is rewritten to http://www.trueresults.com/get-started by Drupal.

If I wanted to keep the url the same, but add an extension to the end (ie. ".html") would that affect my Page Authority? Would Google consider this an entirely new URL?

The reasoning behind this is I am working on setting up some goals and events in my analytics and it requires urls with an extension, it's not accepting my "extension-less" urls.

thanks!

[SamAllen]

To answer your question, if you use appropriate 301 redirects this should not affect your PA.

However you should not need to do this to facilitate your analytics. Why won't it work with an extension?

[Ryan-Ricketts]

Extensionless URLs are a good idea because it helps with unavoidable future platform transitions. If you switch server technologies, you might end pages in .jsp or .html or something else.

Search engines generally consider every character when determining separate URLs. This goes for adding .html and even capital letters. Therefore, these two URLs are different in the eyes of search engines:

www.example.com/page.html

www.example.com/page/

But to really answer your question, adding an extension should have little to no effect on page authority. Search engines are more concerned with your page's content, relevancy, popularity, authority, etc.

[TrueResults]

Thanks for the feeback, based on the responses I've got, I'm going to leave them as-is (extension-less). Regarding the extensions being needed to work with my Goals setup in Google Analytics, I was having trouble getting it to work and speculated that it was due to the missing extension, but now that I know that doesn't matter. I can figure out what the "real" issue is. thanks!