If you’re decidedly non-technical you may never have noticed those letters at the end of some web page URL’s (you know, .php, .asp, .html – they’re called extensions). And believe it or not, as a website user, you’re not really missing anything. As far as your website visitors are concerned those extensions actually serve no purpose. But what about search engines? Does Google want to see “.html” or “.aspx” at the end of your website’s URL’s, maybe for search engine optimization (SEO) reasons? Nope – not even a little bit. So, if users don’t need them, and if search engines don’t need them, why even display them? Good question. Tell your developer to take ‘em off!
It might be one of those things – as a business owner – that you think you’re better of leaving to your web designer. But it never hurts to familiarize yourself with just enough technical jargon to keep those guys honest, right?
If your website has URL extensions, you’ll know what I’m talking about- the “.html” or “.php” or “.aspx” at the end of the URL’s). Like this:
- http://www.example.com/test.html
- http://www.example.com/test.aspx
- http://www.example.com/test.php
Which extension your site uses is dependent on the programming language used to build your site. For the purposes of this discussion, however, it doesn’t matter which extension you use – they’re all unnecessary from a search engine perspective.
I would even go so far as to argue that, from a user perspective, they’re more than just unnecessary – they’re an outright hindrance. You want people to remember page addresses, and link to them later, right? Occasionally people have to do that from memory. So, what’s easier to remember – the URL’s above with extensions, or this one:
- http://www.example.com/test
Shorter generally means easier to remember. Plus, you’ve eliminated a few characters at the end that are basically meaningless to most people. This example increases the chance that someone is going to correctly remember your web page’s address.
Matt Cutts, one of the most famous search engine experts on the planet (partly because he works for Google) has written blog posts on related topics himself, saying: “I would opt for http://www.example.com/ personally instead of http://www.example.com/index.asp. It’s easier for users to remember and to type in, so people linking naturally are more likely to link to the page without the index.asp.”
In Matt’s example he’s talking about whether to display “/index.asp” when visitors view your home page – so the issue is a little different than what I described above. But his reasoning for the suggestion, “It’s easier for users,” is what a great number of his recommendations are tied to – usability. Because the algorithm Google’ uses to rank websites is in many ways just trying to measure which web pages are most relevant, accessible, and usable, I always recommend you use no extensions on your website’s URL’s.
Next time we’ll talk about why removing that ‘www’ from the beginning of the URL makes sense, too.
Facebook
RSS
Twitter