TowerOfPower - 4:48 pm on Jul 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

I believe the general consensus today is to get away from any extensions. And this is what I have seen many websites do.

But...

Personally I think this is very wrong, and my experience is that if your page generates html, give it an .html ending...

I also have non-conclusive evidence that this actually helps your SEO ranking with Google these days. And not just marginally, but by a good percentage.

There is also the benefit of not confusing anyone or anything [spiders,bots,crawlers] of whether URL /cat/sub[/] is a page or a folder. Most of them will try to add an ending '/' to see if they can get into it deeper. And if you do not have the proper mod_rewrite rules set, you are going to have duplicate content. Yes, Google is smart enough to figure it out, but you will still get penalized a bit.