Thanks, no I didnt know that, will check it out

I would be interested to read any evidence that says why this is not SEO best practise. For me it is just a preference...

We had this comment from a SEO company, you could argue it doesn't really matter, but to a corporate customer is just doesn't look good. Drupal, WordPress all have cleaner URLs without page extensions, its becoming an expectation in CMS's.

This has nothing to do with SEO actually, but only with human interpretation. A search engine doesn't care at all if a page ends on .html, .aspx .htm or something complete irrelevant...

However, not using extensions could be more futureproof for when you switch to a new technology (CMS)

more: http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/

Hi Petras,

You wanted to know the reason "why" Umbraco does this out-of-the-box.  Quite simply it to do with the default web-server settings.

With IIS6, only a specific set of file extensions were passed to ASP.NET for handling, these included: .aspx, .ascx, .ashx, .asmx, (to name a few). Since .aspx is the default extension for ASP.NET web-pages, thats what was used.  All other file extensions were handled by IIS6 (usually by the static-file handler).

As mentioned above, Umbraco gives you the option for "umbracoUseDirectoryUrls" ... but this meant some manual intervention for IIS6.

With IIS7, all extensions are routed via ASP.NET ... so its much, much easier to have extension-less URLs.

The reason WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, (+ any other LAMP-based CMS) can do it out-of-the-box is down to clever mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess file.  Try installing WordPress on IIS6, you'll get "index.php" in all of your URLs!!!

IMHO, to have file extensions in your URLs is a matter of personal preference - I haven't seen any impact on SEO for my clients when using .aspx extensions. :-)

Cheers, Lee.

something a bit worse is that url's with or without a / always render the content, and don't redirect to the same url without the trailing slash

in the end the same page is always available on at least three ways:

site.com/page.aspx

site.com/page

site.com/page/

It's not a big deal though is it, if your navigation links and site map are consistent?

Its a big deal if a high paying customer expects it!

Thats about all from the way I see it.

Good answers above, its not an issue anyway since we can configure it to have cleaner URLs

I'd have to argue that it doesn't impact SEO.  It's well known that direct match domain names and file structures have amongst the highest SEO impact.  If the URL/domain are amongst the most important on-site SEO items and each character can dilute the keyword density - you don't want .aspx on every page.

This is the same reason the SEO plugins for Wordpress have options to automatically delete words like, "the" "and" "or" to shorten the urls and try and keep to just keywords.

Hi Chris,

I could find no evidence that the extension has any impact on search engines. There were plenty of sites like this one: http://dailyseotip.com/url-extension-pro-and-cons/356/ that highlight the pros and cons but state that these are preferences and have no effect on SEO.

Are you able to provide some links to support your statement? I'm always happy to learn somethign new :)

I prefer extension-less URLs myself. But there are many more important things a SEO company should be focusing on. When doing SEO recomendations I will usually have a section on "nice to haves" where I mention things like this i.e. things that would be nice to tidy up for cosmetic reasons but ultimately won't make much, if any, difference to their ranking.

Cheers

Paul

http://www.iprospect.com/ audited one of our websites and said extensionaless URLs are preferrable.

The client was an international corporate business with other websites that did not have extensions.

Sitting in a client meeting you just don't look great when you say "our CMS can't do that".

Its not just SEO either, extensionless URLs are easier for non programmers to remember.

LOL. if it so important you would expect them to follow their own advice?

http://www.iprospect.com/whychoose/index.htm

http://www.iprospect.com/whychoose/

http://iprospect.com/whychoose/index.htm

My opinion is:

 - they are preferable (but this is subjective)

 - they have no relevance for SEO purposes

 - I'm not saying "don't use expresionless URLs".

Petras,

"Sitting in a client meeting you just don't look great when you say "our CMS can't do that".

Just to be sure you do know you can have extensionless urls with Umbraco in 2 mins right? If not please read the first page.

Rich

The key word here is "preferable" ... on which, I think, we all agree.

Chris: something i found on the google webmaster central:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=42dc25728cd65170&hl=en

=============   Straight from the FAQ (as of Dec 2009)   =============

http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--crawling--indexing---ranking

"...
#non-html
Q: My website uses pages made with PHP, ASP, CGI, JSP, CFM, etc. Will these still get indexed?
A: Yes! Provided these technologies serve pages that are visible in a browser, Googlebot will generally be able to crawl, index and rank them without problems. One way to double-check how a search engine crawler might see your page is to use a text-only browser such as Lynx to view your pages.
..."


=============   Generally - Google doesn't care   =============

Seriously - Google generally doesn't care what/how your site/content was built.
All it cares about is whether the contents outputted is crawlable.
That means it should be outputting in a recognised and crawlable format.
(This is usually html - but can include other filetypes, inc. pdf)

A second option by Google's SEO expert himself:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/

Sometimes at a conference people will ask me “Does it matter what extension I use for my pages? Does Google prefer .php over .asp, or .html over .htm?” And my answer is “We’re happy to crawl all of these file extensions. It doesn’t matter what you choose between any of those.”

Okay lets be objective and understand that I am trying to take a holistic approach to SEO/web-design - it needs to partially be understood from a totality:

1. Google doesn't care which extension: true - it will crawl any extension 
2. Shorter urls offer denser keyword ratios (w or w/o extensions)
3. Don't use iprospect as an example they are clearly not following best practices (301 redirection of non-www to www, some pages with extensions/some without)
4. Adding index.html - is considered a bad usability practice (ignoring SEO) - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html - Jakob Neilson
5. In general extra code in your website is considered bad for SEO because it creates more for bots to understand and parse.  This is one of the reasons that tables are terrible for site design.  Another is importance of content being nearer to the top which is easy in css - http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/markup-hierarchy-advantages-seo/ (not directly related, but it goes to show that you should minimize any non-essential code or txt).
6. If you look at the major url link recommendations for SEO - short is on the list as #2; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls (but to be fair they don't specifically address extensions in the articles, but the comments are pretty harsh about extensions - and seomoz doesn't use extensions on purpose) - many an article/forum in their closed backend has discussed this
7. Providing an extension can provide a clue as to what technology you utilize to build the site - a negative from a security perspective
8. Extensions provide no value and make a switch in technology more painful if you aren't changing site structure and just need to remap urls to new technology

The best CMS utilizes any backend technology, but spits out clean html, css without forms/viewstates/tables etc.  (PS I work at a Microsoft shop - so I struggle with .Net CMSs, but understand their power).

Chris,

Interested to read your thoughts.

Regarding "301 redirection of non-www to www", what do you recommend?

Rich

Just read this http://umbraco.miketaylor.eu/2010/11/03/url-rewriting-and-seo/

Assuming that it's considered preferable to redirect all www to non www and not the other way around.

Rich

It's preferable to send all non-www to the www version.  My point was that not all of their pages used the same convention.

I seem to remember reading something like, "It's not terrible to redirect www to the non-www version, but it can run into issues if you have other subdomains." a while ago.  

I usually just look at seomoz if I have a question - http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/redirection

And of course if Matt Cutts from Google has written about it - it can be considered very reliable information - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

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