Are URL suffixes ignored by Google? Or is this duplicate content?

[lzhao]

Example URLs:

www.example.com/great-article-on-dog-hygiene.html

www.example.com/great-article-on-dog-hygiene.rt-article.html

My IT dept. tells me the second instance of this article would be ignored by Google, but I've found a couple of instances in which Google did index the 'rt-article.html' version of the page.

To be fair, I've only found a couple out of MANY.

Is it an issue?

Thanks,

Trisha

[LesleyPaone]

They are not ignored by google, they would be seen as duplicate content if the same content is used on each page. Also one thing you should keep in mind too is that you will be diluting the keywords in the page name by adding more.

[Chris.Menke]

As Lesley says, it's not ignored. If the content is exactly the same on both URLs, you can ask your IT folks to include a rel=canonical directive in the header that sets the canonical version of the content to one specific URL or, if a URL isn't needed, it can be 301 redirected to the proper URL.

Canonicalization and the Canonical Tag - Learn SEO - Moz