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.
Changing a url from .html to .com
-
Hello,
I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
-
Yes I have read this thank you
we just did both 301 and canonical. Do you think this is fine? using both? or can it hurt our current SERP results?
-
And, if you are interested, here's a nice blog on it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use
-
The advantage of the 301, although sometimes trickier to implement (my site can't handle canonicals, so I am used to everything being trickier!) is that with the 301, it tells Google that the page content has moved permanently from the old URL. Eventually then Google will un-index the old URL and it will essentially cease to exist.
If implemented properly you shouldn't be hurt as you're still telling Google where to go so they can follow.
-
Sorry. I was not referring to .com... My mistake..
This is the current url http://www.domain.com/something**.html** would taking out the .html hurt our current rankings. For this type of change would it be best to do 301 a canonical or just leave it?
-
Any time you change a URL you need a 301 redirect. If you set it up properly and go from a .html to a .com URL as your primary there shouldn't be too much fall out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Help with facet URLs in Magento
Hi Guys, Wondering if I can get some technical help here... We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout. These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process. Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19 Canonical to... http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html Which I understand to be incorrect. As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution? As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series. Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black ) But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior? My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls. Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?
It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website: www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123 www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456 etc.. How is this normally handled? Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors. I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood1 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?
Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
Or should I use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!0 -
PDF or HTML Page?
One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page. The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents. My thoughts were why not make it a pdf? Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page? If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well? The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0