Did I set up my mod_rewrite correctly for SE?

do I need a trailing slash or file extension

[Trisha]

(I read a post similar to this on another forum here, but I don't remember where it was now.)

The way I have my mod_rewrite set up works, I'm just not certain if SE (Google, but others also) will like it. I went from:

www.mydomain.com/some_dir/article_research.php?research=keyword
to
www.mydomain.com/some_dir/research/keyword

for SE engines spiders to like it do I need:

1 - a file extension like .html, .php, etc.
and/or
2 - a trailing slash like:
www.mydomain.com/some_dir/research/keyword/

Thanks!

[jdMorgan]

Trisha,

I think you want to leave it as it is now. If you put a trailing slash on the end, that could be understood to mean www.mydomain.com/some_dir/research/keyword/index.html, since "index.html" is the default filename if only "/" is specified (and you allow some oversimplification for the sake of a short post).

You could add ".html", ".php", ".asp", etc. to the end of "keyword", but I don't think it's necessary. Adding just a slash and nothing else would likely give undesirable results.

Another suggestion is to go take a look at some big dynamic-pages sites like Amazon and E-Bay, and see what kind of URLs they use for pages which are indexed by search engines.

Jim

[Trisha]

Thanks!