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I am revising the URL's on my site and have settled on one's of the following form....
[dummy_domain.net...]
where "some_file" would get mapped internally to an .html file through an htaccess entry like this...
RewriteRule (.*)/$ /cgi-bin/some.pl?url=$1 [L]
Anyway I was wondering about the URL form I have settled on (but not yet implemented). Is it better than...
[dummy_domain.net...]
in terms of having an effect on page ranking? The only downfall I can see to putting the name of a file inside diretory slashes is that some people might not click on a link like like that because it looks suspicious.
Am I splitting hairs?
Any input on the above would be very appreciated. I want to create URL's that won't change over time. If nothing else my pages are not tied to being .HTML if I remove the extension.
Any other considerations I should think about?
Thanks.
Carlos
Uh... :)
It doesn't make a difference from an seo or PR viewpoint. Base your decision on the differences between the two aporaches in other realms (like readibility for the visitor, ease of site maintenance, ...).
This is not true. Mod ReWrite can easily change the extension!
to me it is more about site architecture/maintenance and usability as Jack suggests.
Somesite/widgets implies a section about widgets with pages like blue-widgets.htm, red-widgets.htm, and so on.
Whereas somesite/widgets.htm to me implies this is the only page about widgets and perhaps no other information is available. I know this is not necessarily the case, but, to me, the implication is there.
There is no real SEO merit or advantage to be gained by using the rewrite functions unless you are trying to convert dynamic URLs to static ones, as in, somesite/page/1/2/3 maps to somesite/page.php?a=1&b=2&c=3
So I guess it really gets back to "why do you want to do it?" and is it necessary/worth it?
Onya
Woz
Mine were very much tied to the use of .html by ending in this quite often.
Just prior to that I had read a serious of articles from Brett about how many sites at Google used a certain number of backslashes in their URL's and how many used an ending at all. Based on research he had done a year or two ago.
So......
I decided to make my URL's more lasting and to get rid of extensions. I had already been working on revising my URL's to keep from having to make labor intensive changes every time I moved files around and revised my underlying directory structure.
My old (and present URL's actually - since I have not yet uploaded the latest changes) are of the form....
[dummy_domain.net...]
The 'a' can be b,c, or any other single letter. Each such letter maps to some physical directory under my domain.
Under the new URL system I have been working on I moved my files up closer to my root by getting rid of the middle "directory". Mainly because I had read that the closer to the root a file is the more weight Google seems to give it.
Now I just pass all file names to a script which pre-pends the correct directory to the file name and then redirects to that file.
By getting rid of naming a file explicitly with an .html ending I am also making my URL's more timeless by taking into account that I may change my files to being XML or other future technology. It won't matter to the URL because it won't indicate or care what underlying technology is being used.
I also looked at Brett's reports in regard to the number of backslashes and did not want to go over having more than 2 or 3 in my URL's.
Now I only have 2 in all of them.
Sorry for the long reply but I figured I better give more insight into what I was doing to clarify things.
Any additional insight or suggestions?
Thanks.
Carlos
PS. I forgot to mention that all my pages are dynamically generated by site scripts that insert easily maintained content into a file with HTML structure tags for my whole site.
