2 replies to this topic

[billybob2]

Hi,

I'm building a site using drupal CMS.
It's going well but I have a search engine related question.

Drupal by default uses URLs like 'mydomain.com/node/14'

It also allows you to give a URL alias to each page so I could give an alias of 'about_us' or 'about_us.html' to the node mentioned above and then users could browse to the page using the URL 'mydomain.com/about_us' or 'mydomain.com/about_us.html'


My question is:
If a webpage does not have a file extension (e.g. .html) will search engines give it less weighting? or even ignore it?
i.e. should I tell the site admins to add '.html' to all their url aliases?

Thanks

[torka]

Add the .html if you want, leave it off it you want. Make up new, nonsense file extensions if it amuses you. While there's a slim possibility you might mildly disconcert some of your human visitors if you decide to make up your own file extensions, it will make no difference to the search engines.

I would suggest not using the underscore as a word separator, though. It tends to get "lost" visually if the URL is reproduced somewhere as a link with an underline, and people are liable to mistake it for a blank space.

--Torka

[bobmeetin]

If it's a new site, then this is probably immaterial as noted.

However if you were transitioning an html site to drupal, joomla, whatever CMS you choose then you might want to set up permanent page redirects for each page. With some CMS's you can do that in the CMS control panel and with others you may need to manually edit the .htaccess RewriteRules.