Does removing the .php / .html extension on your pages effect SEO ?

[hobbsy]

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Is it beneficial to Google SEO ranking to remove the .php / .html extensions from webpages?

eg.

example.com/this-is-my-webpage
example.com/this-is-my-webpage.html
example.com/this-is-my-webpage.php

or does it make absolutely no difference?

Also does using .html / .php extension make a dynamically-created site look more like static pages to search engines?

[mike_01]

Well, I haven't really tested this yet though I use .htaccess to change the extension from .php to .html but would be interesting to know if someone have done this sort of split testing and managed to see some positive/negative results.

Anyone??

[hobbsy]

One of the reasons I ask is because Price Tapestry out-of-the-box has .html extensions - but with a bit of .htaccess you can strip this -- but does it make any difference to Google (?)

[paulb567]

Personally I think .html or .htm are best for SEO purposes.

You could remove them so www.domain.co.uk/name-of-page.html becomes http://www.domain.co.uk/name-of-page but you risk duplicate content / canonical name issues as your pages could be indexed as www.domain.co.uk/name-of-page or www.domain.co.uk/name-of-page/. Keeping the html extension stops this problem.

I've not tested any of this, just my thoughts.

[Andrew Starr]

In my experience it does not make any difference if you are talking about building your site that way from the start, but obv if you already have your page in one format and then change to another, you would then have to redirect from old to new

Also does using .html / .php extension make a dynamically-created site look more like static pages to search engines?

I think the search engines are way too smart to see a .html or .php extension and automatically assume the site is static

[Brendon]

So long as URLs are stable, SEs generally don't care what or if you have file extensions. Obviously, for certain types of content, n appropriate file extension tells them how to correctly handle it, .swv / .fla for Flash files for instance, .js for inline scripts and so on.

Where you strip the .html / .php extension, technically you convert the page to being perceived as a subfolder, which is presumably delivering text / HTML content, so that's no problem.

It's possible you would have to watch how relative URLs behave - by stripping the extension, and converting the content at least nominally to it's own folder, you could cause issues with how ../ and ../../ work, and if that messes up your apparent URL structure, it could cause SES to request pages that don't exist, but that you seem to have linked to.

Perosnally, I'd use file extensions to make it easier to see what is going on (not least so you can distinguish actual sub-folders from pages named like them) and to avoid any possibilty of nasty link loops etc

[Sunlust]

no, google doesn't care.

Matt Cutts says that for a user it is better to use .html OR .php OR any other valid extension, so that they know when they're on a page and when in a subdirectory.

More info on the topic:
YouTube - Should I strip file extensions from my URLs?
Matt Cutts’s Advice On URLs & Page Names | SEOsean.com Blog

[jezaff]

^^ was going to say the same. Google really really does give a lot of advice and help for webmasters - if you want to become an "SEO expert" you don't have to do a lot more than read their help pages and associated blogs .