Is it worth keeping .html even if 301'ing

[jbk365]

We're going from static to a wordpress based ecommerce site.

While we can append .html to urls the directory structure will change so that

www.oursite.com/productname.html  goes to www.oursite.com/product/productname.html

My question is: Is it worth the trouble (from an seo perspective) of using a plugin to append new urls with .html when we're going to have to use 301 redirects anyway?

If not should the urls have a trailing slash?

[LesleyPaone]

I have seen lots of discussion about 301 passing "link juice" and page authority, and what not. If you can mimic the exact structure you have now, then it won't be an issue of whether things will pass. Also, there is a down time in SE's when you change a whole sites urls. You can skip that too if you leave them the same.

[jbk365]

The problem is we can't preserve site structure. Keeping file names the same is not a problem but all new product URLs will have ..../product/.... added.

My question is that as we're forced to use a 301 here anyway, is it worth keeping the .html.

[LesleyPaone]

Actually you can take those off in wordpress. You just have to be careful about collisions. A collision being say a page that has the same name as a product. I use one of the SEO plugins to take the category names off of my site. I know it is not the yoast plugin, but it is the other popular one.

Sorry, I would log in and tell you what it is, but I am on a mobile device and someone has actually been trying to crack my site for the last few days, so I deleted my wp-login page. So the site cannot be logged into currently. When I get back around my desktop I will give you the name of the SEO module I use to do it.

[LesleyPaone]

Hey, I googled it and found it. This is it http://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-ultimate/   Look down at the permalink tweaker, that is what I was talking about.

[jbk365]

Yes, we're familiar with that plugin and we've decided it's to risky in an ecomerce setting.

[LesleyPaone]

I really wouldn't worry about it if I were you. You are choosing to set up an e-commerce site on the most hacked platform in the world.

[john4math]

Since you're doing redirects already, I'd get rid of the .html.  They're not user friendly, and you're already doing a redirect anyways so why not.  Seeing them on URLs looks old to me, most sites don't have them anymore.

Trailing slashes I don't have a strong opinion on.  If these pages will never have pages after them, then I'd opt for no trailing slash, just because I think most sites do that now.