I have still a question about urls. I know now that .html or .php are the same, but what about pages without an extension?

example:
http://www.domain.com/product1.html
http://www.domain.com/product1

Which do you suggest we use for our websites?

Thanks!

M.W.A., that’s because the url is “cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270224738405″. If the url were “cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI. dll” then we wouldn’t have crawled it, but since there was something else in the url that followed the .dll, Google was willing to crawl the url. Note that I said Google won’t crawl the url if ends directly in .exe or .dll or whatever. So http://www.example.com/page.exe we wouldn’t crawl. But http://www.example.com/page.exe?whatever we probably would be willing to crawl.

This explanation makes some sense. I have always used the “definition” of a URL as provided by ASP’s ServerVariables collection, which doesn’t include the querystring (which is a separate animal).

But this leads to another concern, not so much for myself personally but for the average user who may not be so tech-savvy (i.e. the one Sint asked). By this explanation, theoretically http://www.some-domain.com/some-virus.exe wouldn’t be indexed, but http://www.some-domain.com/some-virus.exe?this=a_random_querystring would. I know a lot of people who don’t bother to look at the extension of a link before they click on it (in fact, I would say the vast majority wouldn’t) and may well stumble upon something they’re not supposed to.

It’s also theoretically possible, through cloaking, to present “valid” HTML content to a bot and something completely different to what is perceived to be a human.

I think Sint has a good question…obviously the querystring as a standalone cannot be considered. So what else is?

I am surprised to learn that Google does not use the page extension as an indicator of quality. Even if a small one.

Obviously anyone can hide a dynamic page through mod rewrite etc but still I would have thought that overall on the web there is more webspam in php, asp, aspx, cgi etc pages.

Google, having the worlds best data set to test these things could do a correlation between extensions and quality and I am suprised that there is not a significant lean towards /html or no extension having better quality pages.

Is there really no difference in the quality of pages with php vs htm or is it moreso that the colateral damage to good quality dynamic sites is too high?

No. The trailing slash is NOT used for a filename.

Trailing slash is the correct canonical form for a FOLDER.

Redirect to that form, from the one without it.

I guess since a site:drupal.org query returns 1.4 million results with many of them having no trailing slash and no extension it’s fair to assume Google is OK with this?

Interesting Article.

You briefly mention use of the trailing slash in filenames, i.e. http://www.somesite.com/some-content/

I have used various URL Re-Write methods in the past, some using the trailing slash and some not.

Also, sites with no URL Re-Write in place but with, for example, default.aspx or default.php placed in various folders are quite common so as to achieve “re-write effect” URLs without any actual rewriting.

I am just wondering whether “trailing slash” filenames are prefereble over non slash URLs, or vice-versa.

I suppose “trailing slash” URLs will be one character longer, accounting for the slash, but would that have any advantage/disadvantage when it comes to search ranking?

Would a “trailing slash” page be given less relevance as it could be interpreted as looking as if it belongs a section below the parent document?

Interesting things URLs, they vary so much from site to site.

Mike.

Thanks for clearing some things up again.

I assume Google not only keeps these specific kinds of files (executables, binaries) from the SERP’s because it is possible they aren’t ordinary web pages, but also because downloading these files could be a security risk to users, when an executable contains hazardous code.

Does Google only look at the last characters of an URL, or do you also look at content types etc? Because else one could still get a file into Google by linking to it like http://www.domain.com/somevirus.exe?hello=world (adding a random parameter).

It seems logic to block some extensions of files that are, according to the web standards, no part of a web page, but ignoring the extension if a GET parameter is provided sounds a bit inconsistent to me. Especially when there are better ways to determine of which type a file is.

Maybe you could tell a bit more about why Google is handling the extensions this way?