A simple SEO guideline says that you should end your urls in .htm, .html or make them as mine. Some do not follow this and end them in .php, .asp and other programming languages. It might not be as good as the ones ended in .html, but Matt Cutts say they are and there’s no problem.
Yet he stated clearly that URLs ended in .exe or .0 were not indexed at all until a few days ago. Now it seems Google does index them but we can’t be sure it gives them full trust and doesn’t penalize them.
SEOmoz has faced this problem with their Web 2.0 Awards, that had the url “http://www.seomoz.org/web.2.0″, which finished in .0 .
So take care how you format your URL to be search engine friendly and don’t get penalized.
Have you ever faced an issue with an improper formatted URL not to be indexed by Google ?
June 21st, 2008 at 8:20 am
Hmm…….. Thanks for the suggestion. I shall follow your advice.
June 24th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Yet he stated clearly that URLs ended in .exe or .0 were not indexed at all until a few days ago. Now it seems Google does index them but we can’t be sure it gives them full trust and doesn’t penalize them.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Being correctly indexed is so important for your website. Thank you keeping us up to date with this information.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:13 am
I have mine in .php so thanks for this news i’ll change all of them right away and i have to say i love to read your posts
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I can understand why. Usually exe files cannot always be trusted because of their nature. Thanks for the good information and I will be sure to leave these types files away from my site.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:01 am
Thanks for the great advice. I will surely follow your advice.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
All of my URL’s end in .html. I make sure of that in order to avoid stinky business like this.
July 9th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Alex, I think .php is quite ok, if you keep them clean. Although, I have seen websites without mod-rewrite which have a lot of indexed pages, even if theit url’s had “&” or “$” in their structure. But I agree that clean, .html or .htm url’s are the best choice.
Florin
July 10th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
All of my URL’s end in .htm or .html. I think its just good practice, plus it looks more like a legitimate site as well.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:50 am
Thanks a ton for the tip! I’ll surely follow it.
July 15th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
I am not convinced .php is penalised at all, I have had great success using php. Interesting example there of web2.0 though, I would never have thought about that.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Thanks for the tips..
July 17th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
.php should be OK. Back in its early days Google didn’t rank php-pages as well as html because they were too unstable (content went offline or changed often). Nowadays Google can cope well with dynamic pages and has no problems with .php-urls. However it’s recommended to not use too many and too long variables. And don’t forget that .html-links are often easier to remember for your users.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Php ending should be ok. Anyway, they could be transformed into htm/html by using .htaccess, if you really want to do this.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:40 am
great article thanks for the post
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:15 pm
All of mine end in .html it seems to be the most common.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I also aprishiated the administration for this article. I really never sat before that Url can not be end like this. Thanks a lot in step to my SEO edducation
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:37 am
Thanks for the great advice I will follow your advice.