Why the Period After the .html?

[vetofunk]

Recently a page on my site seems like it was hit with the 950 penalty. Not sure if this is the reason or not, but looking through the pages that are spidered in Google, I found out I had two pages being spidered that had the same exact content (happens to be the section that was possibly penalized):

www.example.com/file.html
and
www.example.com/file.html.

For some reason, Google has found/created a page that has a period at the end of it. I talked with my developer and no such page exists on our server. I am worried that this is the reason I was penalized, but I can see how I had anything to do with it...and don't see what I can do about it?!

Any thoughts?

[edited by: tedster at 10:24 pm (utc) on Feb. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[LifeinAsia]

It's possible that some site somewhere has a malformed link pointing to www.example.com/file.html. and Google's spiders picked up on it.

The first question that comes to mind is why is your web server/application server parsing a file names that way? The potential for duplicate content is one reason not to do it.

[Robert Charlton]

For some reason, Google has found/created a page that has a period at the end of it. I talked with my developer and no such page exists on our server.

Do you have a link to the page somewhere on your site that has period at the end of the url?

Or, there might be an external inbound link with a period at the end.

[Receptional Andy]

Try spidering your site with a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth. This should allow you to see if you have any invalid links internally.

LifeinAsia is right that your server should be delivering a 404 response to this request, though. Fixing that would likely be a job for your developer. Fixing the link(s) may be yours!

[buckworks]

Links with periods at the end sometimes occur on forums where the software automatically turns URL references into active links.

It happens when the poster happens to mention your URL at the end of a sentence and puts a period right after it. The forum software includes the period in the hyperlink. I've also seen the same thing happen with commas.

[extra]

I discovered something similar with google last week.
My statstics provider had a link from www.google.no.
When I tried to access this "ekstra dot site", I was forwarded to google.no

[phranque]

as mentioned above it was probably caused by an incorrect link at the end of a sentence.
the only thing i would suggest different from the above reponses is that it might be more useful to do a 301 to the correct url instead of a 404.