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.html better than .php

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keak

Programmer
Sep 12, 2005
247
CA
I was recently told that its better to name pages .html and parse it as php in terms of SEO?

Is this the case for large sites like google and yahoo as well? or is this meant for smaller scales se's ?

 
Hi

The search engines are not influenced by the file extensions. That will only slow down your web server, because it will parse the static files too, looking for interpretable portions.

Using .html extension instead of .php is only good to hide the used server side scripting language, but of course, that will not give neighter security. SEO benefits even less.

Feherke.
 
I was recently told that its better to name pages .html and parse it as php in terms of SEO?

Utter garbage, don't listen to that person again.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
Utter garbage, don't listen to that person again.

What if it was his mother? would you really outcast your own, poor, (probably elderly) mother just because she made a mistake about her SEO techniques? lol

Agreed though, there was a MASSIVE debate on this a while back on the forum's ... the SE's are much smarter than that, they'll be looking for clever things like relevant content and such like.

I wouldnt waste your time ammending your extensions.

Rob
 
OK, just came across this thread and I wanted some people's opinions. One of my friends rekons that it's looks more professional to use .html rather than .php. Does anybody else think this, because I don't agree. This is nothing to do with SEO - purely from a "human" point of view. For a start, personally I think ordinary users won't notice, and secondly just becauase your file extension is .html doesn't mean you're not doing like keak anyway and parsing your html files thru a php engine.

Anyway, just wanted some opinions from some people
 
I'd agree, most users won't notice.

From a professionality point of view, I think the only person that will be judging you on your extensions is a fellow developer, I always take note of people's file extensions, and if i see someone with .asp or php extensions i always chuckle to myself know that they've worked 3 times as hard as me to produce the same result.

From a point of view of a general surfer, i really dont think they'll notice, although they'll automaticaly note all the variables listed after the file extension like ?id=37474&homedec=yes+no&thisiscool=yesiknow!4% and probably think, "ooh, that looks like amazon and hotmail" which may sway them into thinking you play ball with the big boys.

But I really dont think its an issue, use whatever you are more conformatable.

I know i dont have an issue with showing my .cfm extensions on my sites, the only time i would ever consider changing things over to .html is if i had massive datasets which were very slow to load or a massive resource drain, in that case you can parse the data on a daily basis into static html files and let you users surf those.

Rob
 
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