Similar question to the two previous posters:

category.example.com/item-title/
vs
http://www.example.com/category/item-title/

I’m more interested in which url is preferred by Google visitors than which ranks better. The sub-domain category is shorter, but the www domain url could be considered more safe. Has Google done any testing of this?

For me “folder/index.html” is the same like “folder/” cause the index file would be called automatically so I would drop the index.html part. But I’m really sure “domain.com/folder/” would be better than “domain.com/folder” (missed trailing slash).

Maybe Matt could bring some light into but currently I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter for Google for the “index.html”- or the “product1/”- vs. “product1.html”-thing.

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

is it better to link to a file (index.html) or the folder?

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.