Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
-
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first.
I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs.
For example
website.com/category/sub-category.html
Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/
We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings.
By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category?
Second question:
If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case.
For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category
Duplicate content/pages?
-
Similarly to any link, not just 301:
"The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link."
So 301s are just fine.
-
Matt Cutts said, in 2013, that about 15% of pagerank is lost through a 301 redirect.
-
Thanks for the speedy answer, I had suspected the same thing so I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion. Thanks for your help.
-
Hi Joshua
subcategory.htm pages will perform just as well as subcategory/ and having .htm in the URL doesn't affect link juice flow at all. .htm or .html are perfectly valid HTML files; however, some prefer having shorter, "nicer" looking URLs. If this is the case and the website is still in the early stages of SEO, then 301 redirect the .htm URLs and make sure every navigation elements links to the non-htm URLs in the future.
In some cases, the slash ending URLs can be considered duplicate pages (even though I'm pretty sure Google will understand the honest mistake), so it's one of the basic SEO recommendations to set redirections and make sure the website navigation doesn't mix the two. Also, SEO tools will keep sending you duplicate page title warnings, so it's better to clean it up as soon as possible.
Hope it helps.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword Ranking Fluctuations
Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine. It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Wrong URLs indexed, Failing To Rank Anywhere
I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank. It was published in Nov/Dec last year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.) I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned. Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL! I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up…. Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do? I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?
Good Morning! I have been trying to clean up this website and half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me. I found this post on Moz from last year: http://outdoorsrank.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed. I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly. Thanks everybody!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0