Are dynamic pages with HTML ending counted as backlinks more often?

[ichthyous]

I was looking at some competitor's sites that are ranking better than mine today. None of them has a higher PR, none has more descriptive or better text on the page, and none had more or better IBL's. What did they ALL have that I don't? Google has all their own internal pages counted as backlinks, whether they have any PR or not. Almost none of my internal pages are counted as backlinks.

All of these sites are dynamic, but I have noticed they all use the .html page ending, while my pages don't...for example: example.com/category/page-name.html vs. example.com/category/page-name/. Apparently having your own internal pages rank as backlinks makes a huge difference, but does the html ending help those pages to be counted?

[tedster]

Be careful in any backlink analysis that relies on what Google reports. Their link: operator results are not anywhere near complete or dependable.

Having your internal pages all indexed helps, no doubt about that. But the form of the url does not enter into it as far as I can see.

[Robert Charlton]

All of these sites are dynamic, but I have noticed they all use the .html page ending, while my pages don't...for example: example.com/category/page-name.html vs. example.com/category/page-name/. Apparently having your own internal pages rank as backlinks makes a huge difference, but does the html ending help those pages to be counted?

The html extension offers no ranking advantage in Google... so "example.com/category/page-name.html" has no advantage over "example.com/category/page-name". Note that I did not put a trailing slash after "page-name".

Use trailing slashes where you're referencing a directory... and no slash where you're referencing an extensionless file.

You'd have "example.com/category/" ...with a trailing slash... to reference the default page of your subdirectory named "category," and "example.com/category/page-name" to reference an extensionless file called "page-name".

[ichthyous]

Does anyone have experience with switching from one type of page name to the other and seeing an improvement in their internal pages getting indexed or counted as links? Will removing the trailing slash at the end of page names (but not directories) have the same effect? Thanks for any advice

[Asia_Expat]

I have no idea why the following is the case... but I offer it as an observation...

My forum pages (dynamic URL's, no extention) have been outranking my static content for some time now. The forum content has no description meta and the forum software architecture makes it near impossible to correct that. The forum software is also bloated with code... however, the forum content is still outranking well optimised static pages with unique meta descriptions, light code and compliant in every way. Similar topics in the XHTML section of the website are often grouped with the forum content as a secondary result (indented).
In my opinion, the extension, or lack of extension, is meaningless in the algo.

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 2:21 pm (utc) on Dec. 23, 2007]