SEO urls in rails: .html ending vs. none. What's best?

Question

Hi,

I'm thinking about a good SEO Url strategy for a blog application. I'm not sure - and maybe it's just the same - but what is better? With or without .html

/blog/entry_permalink_name.hml

VS

/blog/entry_permalink_name

What do you think?

Answer 1

I would suggest removing /blog/ from the url and making it as follows: /entry-permallink-name

word 'blog' introduces extra irrelevant term to your URL .html would be mostlikely ignored by search engines, but it's absence makes it a bit more user-friendly, so do dashes instead of underscores.

Answer 2

I disagree about not having the blog entry in there. I don't think 'blog' is an irrelevant term since you are writing a 'blog' application and good has a search 'blog' section.

As for your question, look in your address bar when you view this question. Stack overflow seems like a good site to emulate.

I do agree with xelurg about the dashes instead of underscores.

Answer 3

I would keep the unique id in the name just like stackoverflow. It's a lot simpler that way.

Answer 4

To answer directly you question, without the HTML is better SEO-wise. The search engines take keywords from the url into account. Now the more words or characters there are in the url the weaker the power of a given keyword.

It follows logically that there is no SEO advantage in adding '.html' at the end of the url.

Similarly removing the blog bit would enhance the power of the keywords in the title but if you want to use 'blog' as a valuable keyword, leave it.

Keep in mind that the url is just one of many factors of optimization of a page for SEO, and not the most powerful at that. The common thinking here is that none of these optimization tricks make a substantial difference by themselves but they do cumulatively.