This post is going to be a timely addition to the URI discussions previously covered on the pages of bloSEO (Keywords in URLs, Underscores vs. Dashes). Today we will be talking about the file extensions in URLs. Many believe that adding “.html” or “.htm” to the name of a page will help page ranking or improve positioning in search results.

According to Matt Cutts (a link for those who is not familiar with this name) this will not affect your page ranking. The popularity of the directory-style structure for page URLs has made it a standard case for most SE algorithms. If the file extension is missing or can’t be recognized, the file will be downloaded and the bots will try to recognize them by headers. So, picking directory-style URLs over extensions will not hurt your website. Google seems to be indifferent as for the number of slashes in a URL. However if your main traffic source is Yahoo, MSN or some other search engine you should investigate this matter more closely and be more careful with how deep the URL structure is.

Added 03/10/08

A bit more on Google bot and file handling

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