Ending URLs in .html versus /

[Travis-W]

Hi there!

Currently all the URLs on my website, even the home page, end it .html, such as http://www,consumerbase.com/index.html

Is this bad?
Is there any benefit to this?

Should I remove it and just have them end with a forward slash?
If I 301 redirect the old .html URLs to the forward slash URLs, will I lose PA?

Thanks!

[jesse-landry]

• Not bad

• Benefit only comes from a usability preference. Do you think your readers would rather see it without the html suffix? Some people think so.. I personally don't think it matters at all but a lot of people will say "shorter is better." It also maximizes your compatibility should you ever change your format from an html to an active server page or something of the sort. (i think that's pretty rare though.)

• No you will not lose PA. 301s maintain link juice (for the most part.)

[TomRayner]

Hey there!

There's no benefit or negative effect of this either way - so there's really nothing to worry about here.

Furthermore, if you type in http://www.consumerbase.com/ you get redirected to the .html version and it's the same for internal pages.  This means you've not got any problems with duplicate URLs or content.

In short, everything is in order and from an SEO point of view there's no reason to make the change - all is well!  The only reason why you may want to make the change is from a user experience point of view - but I don't think visitors to your site will be concerned with .html extensions at all.

Hope this helps to put your mind at rest!

[toddmumford]

In my experience you will generate more consistent inbound links to the root url - http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html - if you were to use that as the root (canonical) url and do the following

1. Ask anyone linking to /index.html to link to http://www.consumerbase.com/
2. Once completed, 301 redirect /index.html to http://www.consumerbase.com/

Ask yourself this: how often do you see someone refer an audience to http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html?

There rarely, do - out of convenience and ease of use / standardization.

So, for sharing and for ensuring that all inbound link weight is organized at only one canonical url I would suggest you consider using http://www.consumerbase.com/ at the root.

All other pages can use use .html just fine.

Hope this helps,
Todd

[GeoffKenyon]

As everyone else has said, it doesn't really make a difference whether you have a file/extension as part of the URL. But if you do change your URLs and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, you will lose some link equity (typically about 10%-15%); I'm not sure if this devaluation is reflected in OSE/Moz metrics.

That said, I would recommend showing the directory without a file extension (using consumerbase.com/ instead of consumerbase.com/index.html). If you change platforms in the future to something that runs off PHP or some other language, displaying .html file types might not be an option but you can always display the directory. If you set yourself up now to display without the doc type, you don't have to worry about these changes in the future as much.