Is it worth keeping .html even if 301'ing
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Yes, we're familiar with that plugin and we've decided it's to risky in an ecomerce setting.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
I'm doing a crawl analysis for a website and finding all these duplicate URLs with "null" being added to them and have no clue what could be causing this.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Our dev team thinks it's caused by mobile pages they created a while ago but it is adding 1000's of additional URLs to the crawl report and being indexed by Google. They don't see it as a priority but I believe these could be very harmful to our site. examples from URL string:
Web Design | | julianne.amann
uruguay-argentina-chilenullnull/days
rainforests-volcanoes-wildlifenullnull/reviews
of-eastern-europenullnullnullnull/hotels0 -
Community Discussion - How do you sync your marketing with your customers' experience?
Hi everyone! This week's Community Discussion comes from Tuesday's Moz Blog post by Mackenzie Fogelson, "Why Content Strategy Isn't Enough." Mackenzie says: "What you stand for as a company and a brand drives your products, your actions as a company, and also your marketing. More importantly, it will be the spark that ignites a connection with the people in your community. When it comes down to it, people will continue to have access to more: more content, more products, and more choice. The need to build meaningful relationships with your customers is not an optional approach, but a requirement. Identifying and communicating your purpose as a brand is just one part of making this happen. The rest is delivering a seamless, authentic experience." It's becoming more and more important to be aware of all aspects of your brand and your customers' experience. When you think of your content strategy, does it include all the potential customer touchpoints in their journey? Is this something you've already been doing, or is it a new idea to you? What's your strategy for making sure your online marketing efforts sync up with a visitor's or customer's experience?
Web Design | | MattRoney5 -
301 htaccess redirect or 301 HTTP DNS Redirect
Hi, I was wondering which you would recommend for a 301 redirect. Should we do a 301 redirect from .htacess or should we do a HTTP DNS 301 redirect. The HTTP redirect, does a redirect from the DNS Provider and doesn't require that we keep hosting the site while the htacess redirect still requires hosting. Thanks!
Web Design | | MattJD0 -
What does it mean that "too many links" show up in my report - but I'm not seeing them?
I've noticed that on the crawl report for my site, www.imageworkscreative.com, "too many links" is showing up as a chronic problem. Reviewing the pages cited as having this issue, I don't see more than 100 links. I've read that sometimes, websites are unintentionally cloaking their links, and I am concerned that this is what might be happening on my site. Some example pages from my crawl report are: http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/, http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/10-steps-seo-and-sem-success/index.html, and http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/business-objectives-vs-user-experience/index.html. Am I having a cloaking issue or is something else going on here? Any insight is appreciated!
Web Design | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Need to hire a tech for find out why google spider can't access my site
Google spider can't access my site and all my pages are gone out of serps. I've called network solutions tech support and they say all is fine with the site which is wrong. does anyone know of a web tech who i can hire to fix this issue? Thanks, Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Question #1: Does Google index https:// pages? I thought they didn't because....
generally the difference between https:// and http:// is that the s (stands for secure I think) is usually reserved for payment pages, and other similar types of pages that search engines aren't supposed to index. (like any page where private data is stored) My site that all of my questions are revolving around is built with Volusion (i'm used to wordpress) and I keep finding problems like this one. The site was hardcoded to have all MENU internal links (which was 90% of our internal links) lead to **https://**www.example.com/example-page/ instead of **http://**www.example.com/example-page/ To double check that this was causing a loss in Link Juice. I jumped over to OSE. Sure enough, the internal links were not being indexed, only the links that were manually created and set to NOT include the httpS:// were being indexed. So if OSE wasn't counting the links, and based on the general ideology behind secure http access, that would infer that no link juice is being passed... Right?? Thanks for your time. Screens are available if necessary, but the OSE has already been updated since then and the new internal links ARE STILL NOT being indexed. The problem is.. is this a volusion problem? Should I switch to Wordpress? here's the site URL (please excuse the design, it's pretty ugly considering how basic volusion is compared to wordpress) http://www.uncommonthread.com/
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Site Re-Design - Running old XML site map for 301's
Hi all, We are going to launch a new site design for our current e-commerce site. I have taken this opportunity to change some categories due to keyword research and all old categories will be 301ed to best fitting new category. So I have 2 questions about moving stuff over; 1. I read that leaving the old xml site map running for the first week, would help, because this would give crawlers the chance to run through the site and follow the 301s, which would help pass the juice. How true does this sound? 2. I was thinking of re-writing all category and sub category titles, meta descriptions and on page content. The positive of this is loads of fresh content - but doing this all at the same time with the new site launch might see some major dropping in search ranking. I've identified our top traffic keyword terms/pages, would it be more wise to leave these pages, and change the others, or would the total new fresh burst have a better impact? Cheers
Web Design | | ToxicFox0 -
SEOMoz crawl report shows a duplicate content and duplicate title for these two url's http://freightmonster.com/ and http://freightmonster.com/index.html. How do I fix this?
What page is attached to http://freightmonster.com/ if it is not the index.html ? Should I do a redirect from the index page to something more descriptive?
Web Design | | FreightBoy1