I've been reading up on best practices for URL endings. I've consulted with a top SEO consultant and he says that his recommendation is to eliminate any kind of extension (.html, .php, etc.) and instead form all URLs with a trailing slash. This answer is based in part on the fact that Wordpress, which now accounts for 20% of the internet, uses trailing slashes by default:
www.myblog.com/my-blog-post/
There are other considerations but this seems to be one of the main ones.
My site URLs currently all end in .html
Does anyone here have any opinions on this?
Do people tend to (subconsciously perhaps) look at .html URLs as “outdated” when they see them in search engine results?
The url is a very low ranking factor. My opinion (but I am NOT an SEO expert - no one really is) is that[list]
[]foo.com/my-product
[]foo.com/my-product/
[*]foo.com/my-product.html
[/list]
would all rank equally.
However, there is a tradition of having categories in ecommerce sites (and directories in other sites) end without a suffix where an end-point page ends with a suffix. I don't think it matters at all whether a non-suffixed url has a trailing slash or not.
The URL suffix does tell the robot what to expect though just like with images.
The impression I'm getting is that extensions like .html and .php will eventually be frowned upon, so [list]
[]foo.com/my-product
[]foo.com/my-product/
[/list]
would be future proof, whereas [list]
[*]foo.com/my-product.html
[/list]
presumably wouldn't.
As far as search engines go (and searchers for that matter), the .html is an unnecessary addition.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
It needs to be a combination of things;
page title
meta description
url
links from other websites
All help your SERPS ranking. Meta keywords are redudant with Google, it will find its keywords in your content and the above mentioned items.
Oh, FWIW, our urls have been; mysite.com/category/product-name for a few years now. We rank extremely well on Google.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1409174782' post='190873']
[list]
[]foo.com/my-product
[]foo.com/my-product/
[/list]
would all rank equally.
[/quote]
The main idea is that you should have only one URL for page. If there are two or more urls , for example with / and without / , and there is no redirect from the page with / to the one without / , the page is considered to be doubled and it will cause ranking problems.
If you want to find out how the URL itself affects ranking, examine top ten result in your area.
Google doesnt look for
/
or
.html
or
.htm
or any other extension/
It looks for relevant content to what users are looking for.
When was the last time you searched for “yellow widgets.html”
[quote name='kingsleypress' timestamp='1409164053' post='190852']
Does anyone here have any opinions on this?
Do people tend to (subconsciously perhaps) look at .html URLs as “outdated” when they see them in search engine results?
[/quote]
In my experience, the URL ending with .html vs without any extension has definitely impact on SEO. You should have a consistent URL structure throughout your site to make sure search engines can understand the overall structure. We as humans consider this as pretty straightforward job but for bots to recognize your website in and out, they still need your guidance to understand your website.
I have been struggling with CSCart's rankings on Google for last 2 years. I had OsCommerce based website before and after switching over to CSCart, we lost 1/2 of the traffic. When I check the access.log, I still see Google Bot is requesting old URLs.
One of the major issue with CSCart is that Google does not recognize the URL structure and the website structure as much as the other open source platforms, such as Wordpress, OsCommerce. This topic has been discussed on this forum before and have been concluded that having CSCart or Wordpress should not make a difference but it definitely did for me. At the time, I made the transition over to CSCart (end of 2012), I had all my websites on OsCommerce and I switched all of them over to CSCart. On average, the traffic loss has been not less than %50 and after 2 years, I have not recovered from it.
CSCart returns 200 for the following URLs and it is definitely confusing for search engines:
abc.com/xyz/
abc.com/xyz
abc.com/XYZ/
abc.com/XYZ
All the other stuff like index.php?dispatch= and category filters created a big mess for Bing Bot. Bing Bot crawled thousands of pages and thought I had that many pages on the website.
After five years of using CS-Cart I'm seriously considering switching to a different platform (which I won't mention here). Hence the question. If I'm changing platforms, maybe I should change my URL structures as well. I guess my question is: will the .html extension be dead in 5 or 10 years time?
Thanks everyone for your contributions so far.
@mazter - good description
Two things…
Search engines use the sitemap as the “guide” to the site. It should match up with the links from pages. If there's no sitemap, it just mean more work for them and I'd bet (though no one has real info on this) that you get a slight downgrade for no sitemap and/or for a sitemap that is out of data with the actual site.
The hostname portion of a URL is case INsensitive. I.e. foo.com is the same as FOO.coM. However, the path portion (or in our terms here, the SEO name) is not. So foo.com/XYZ is a completely different page than foo.com/xyz But foo.com/XYZ is the same as foo.com/XYZ/. When the SEO engine resolves these to the same actual page, you will get duplicate content issues because they are viewed as different pages with the same content. The SEO engine should be literal and not interpretive.
@Kingsley - I don't think any file extension will go away and I don't think it matters whether you use foo.com/mypage, foo.com/mypage/ or foo.com/mypage.html. I think the key points are:[list=1]
[]Be consistent in usage
[]Ensure sitemap is updated every time pages are updated (or just created daily)
[*]Use all lower case for everything in a URL
[/list]
I think if you do that, you won't have any issues.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1409771542' post='191395']
Search engines use the sitemap as the “guide” to the site. It should match up with the links from pages. If there's no sitemap, it just mean more work for them and I'd bet (though no one has real info on this) that you get a slight downgrade for no sitemap and/or for a sitemap that is out of data with the actual site.
[/quote]
I wish it was as easy as setting up the sitemap. The sitemap only gives them the list of URLs on your website but the logical structure is presented throughout your website. One of the most influential way is to represent it through URLs. Google recently announced that they will recognize schema.org for Breadcrumbs, which was really necessary but before that they were using URLs and they will always be using the URLs to understand the structure of your website. That is the main reason it is very crucial where your category links are shown on your website and how they are structured to map out the logical structure.
You might have 5 categories ending with trailing slash, how Google would know which categories are main categories and which categories are subcategories mainly depend upon your URLs. How and where you show your URLs will create almost like a heatmap throughout your website and Google will take its time to understand the logical structure and relationship between these URLs in time. If you have similar content on two different pages, they will use URL, where it was showed and in which context and along with other signals, they will decide whether to rank that page over the other vice verse.
What I am trying to state is better explained in this in this article http://moz.com/learn/seo/url:
[quote]
- Semantics
A well-crafted URL should semantically make sense. The DPReview URL above is a good example of a semantically accurate URL. (This of course assumes that the page actually is about what is described) It is easy to tell the subject of the URL just by examining its URL. This is helpful to both humans and search engines.
- Relevancy
The other benefit of having a semantically correct URL, is that webmasters are more likely to get search engine-referred traffic due to the keywords in the URL. These, like title tags, are used for determining relevancy and computing rankings.
[/quote]
[quote name='kingsleypress' timestamp='1409752966' post='191384']
If I'm changing platforms, maybe I should change my URL structures as well. I guess my question is: will the .html extension be dead in 5 or 10 years time?
Thanks everyone for your contributions so far.
[/quote]
5-10 years time is a very long time frame. Google is getting smarter and smarter. They even tested ranking websites without using 'links' recently. It didn't work but it gives us an idea where they want to be in 10 years.
Regarding your question about “.html” as an extension or not, I would recommend you to checkout your industry and some of the websites that you visit regularly. Check out your competitors and see what they are doing on their websites. I have sticked to “.html” for product pages and used “/” for category pages.
It also depends on the platform you might decide to move and what that platform can offer. In terms of common SEO, CSCart is very good. Google Sitemap addon, SEO optimized URLs for most of the website (at least since 3.x). Especially with rich snippets on new release, it makes it really powerful right out of the package.
I'm getting ready to set up a test site with the new platform and let it run for a few months and see what Google does with it. Then I will compare with my current CS-Cart site and see if I would be ahead to switch.
How do we remove the trailing slash from our store URL’s?
E.g.
From
www.teststore.com/category/subcategory/product/
To
www.teststore.com/category/subcategory/product
The marketing wizard competitors use this format, and it looks cleaner for the customer.
We are using the built-in CS-Cart SEO add-on and for now, that’s good for our needs.
I have seen an add-on that can remove trailing slashes but we don’t need all the other features.
How can I modify the CS-Cart SEO addon?
Or, am I better to use ReWrite?
V4.16.2
Do you use SEO Filters module from AB ? As far as I remember, it allows to enable/disable trailing slash
I couldn’t find it in their SEO Filters but found it in their Indexation Management add-on.
There’s an option to add trailing slashes if they are missing, but it’s not clear if the setting will remove them if they are present.
I have asked AB for clarification.
If not the Cart-Power SEO Add-on will do it, and has a lot of bonus features that after some research will be good for our site. Add-ons :: Optimization / SEO :: SEO optimization
For reference, I found some good info on clean ReWrites while reducing the number of redirects.
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Our website, https://cs-cart.pl uses slashes across all products and other pages in store. We never encountered any kind of SEO issues.
I agree, it’s not a problem for SEO.
It’s to make the URL’s look cleaner for the customer, UI experience etc.