Sites with no file extension

How can it be and does google like that

[pallaton]

Hi all,

I saw a few websites doing realy good in google, all of the site pages are with no extesion.

for example: www.domain.com/about

and its not a directory

does anyone now what is that, and if it's any good for SE.

thanks,
Pallaton

[miedmark]

and its not a directory

how do you know?

To me it looks like "about" is the folder - if not filename given it will look inside about folder for index.htm, default.asp etc....

[Vadim]

Google need not a file at the end of URL (URI). It needs content provided by HTTP. Whether it is dynamic or from the file does not matter for the search engines. Untill the URL always provide the same topic you are safe.

Vadim.

[ruip]

There are a way to redirect visitors for a dir, without any dir. Some spammers use it, we can make any directories we want.

Some spammers use it until now, have many virtual directories with duplicated content, now they can't do that

www.domain.com/keyword/
www.domain.com/keyword1/

server have only a site but many virtual directories with same content. A old spam tecnic.

[guru5571]

It's the index page of a directory or else has been rewritten to look like one.

[rjohara]

Setting up your site/server to omit file extensions in URLs is actually the recommended way of organizing a website [w3.org], although relatively few people follow the recommendation because it involves crufty server configuration work.

[zCat]

By default, Apache uses the file ending to determine the correct mime type to send. If you rename "widget.jpg" to just "widget", it will default to "text/plain" and the browser will display garbage.

I believe you can configure mod_mime_magic to get round this, but presume this is a performance drag because it means Apache has to look at every file to determine (= make an educated guess about) the mime type.

It's also possible for highly customizable CMS systems to be able to map arbitrary URLs and filenames to particular types of content.

[LeChuck]

As said this is mod_rewrite in action. They probably have something like this in their .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ index.php?topic=$1&page=$2 [L]

Which means that when you type www.example.com/veggies/carrot their server responds as if you had typed www.example.com/index.php?topic=veggies&page=carrot

If this is not implemented carefully they could be in duplicate content hell if someone decided to play with them, as in any cms. They have probably disallowed any ?'s in requests so that you can't get www.example.com/index.php?topic=veggies&page=carrot and cause a duplicate content penalty.

They should also validate that the page you are trying to get is associated with the topic you have indicated. Otherwise a request for www.example.com/utensils/carrot would yield duplicate content.

You have to be careful when doing this.

--
[w3.org...]

"What to leave out

File name extension. This is a very common one. "cgi", even ".html" is something which will change. You may not be using HTML for that page in 20 years time, but you might want today's links to it to still be valid. The canonical way of making links to the W3C site doesn't use the extension."

[kunwarbs]

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ index.php?topic=$1&page=$2 [L]

This works perfectly for the index file in the root folder. but how do I rewrite it for a file residing in an inside folder say

I want to pass the values topic=veggies&page=carrot to a index file insided the directory dir1 www.example.com/dir1/index.php

[py9jmas]

Another easy way to do this with Apache:
[httpd.apache.org...]

[LeChuck]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/dir1/)
RewriteRule ^dir1/(.*)/(.*)$ /dir1/index.php?topic=$1&page=$2 [L]

If you want to exclude some subdirs so they are treated as actual dirs instead of variables this is what you want:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!((/sub1/)¦(/sub2/)¦(/sub3/))
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ index.php?topic=$1&page=$2 [L]

Edit: WebmasterWorld mangles the "¦", press the key to the left of 1 to get the correct one.

[pallaton]

great anwers amigos,
Thanks for all of the replays.

I'm trying to do as LeChuck says but I'm getting an error.
It block the directory the .htaccess is in.

any idas?

Thanks,
Pallaton

[pallaton]

Sorry...
It's working now.

In my apache config the rewrite was disable.

[moltar]

Certain CMS have that feature built in. I know WebGUI is one of them. All URLs are in the root. No hierarchy.

[arrowman]

With Zope and the CMS's built on it (such as Plone) you'll normally get this type of url. E.g. [plone.org...]

It's nothing special, just a name without a dot and some letters at the end.