remove .html part of url title

[MGLorencin]

Hello everyone, I am really glad I found your site and am starting to test things.

I have a qustion regarding url titles, why do is .html part at the end needed, from reading some SEO oriented forums it's adviced to ditch this part and just leave it free.

Folders should generaly end with / and files without without anything at the end

I am asking this as I have all my websites set up no to have anything at the end, for example.

-www.mydomain.com/categoy/some-article-name

instead of

-www.mydomain.com/categoy/some-article-name.html

What is your opinion on this and can this .html part be removed easily from the code, or would it be the easiest to play a bit with htaccess?

[MGLorencin]

well I managed to modify it for links to end only with a dot.

[dcz]

But with the phpBB SEO mod rewrite, you can easily end up with url such as :

Code: Select all

example.com/forum-url/topic-title-txx/
example.com/forum-url/topic-title-txx/pageyy.html

You'd just need to set the topic extension to '/' instead of '.html' by default and generate a new .htaccess.

This of course raises the need to properly redirect the old urls to the new ones in case you are working on a live forum and would like, after you started using a different standard, to use '/' as topic url extensions, but it's easy to do.

Now from the SEO point of view, I realy doubt that using nothing or '/' as a suffixe instead of '.html' would make this much difference.
Of course, the url would end up being a bit shorter, but honestly relying on file extension to rank pages justs seems close to non sense, relevancy of content is very far from being related to the extension, and if it was the case, '.html' could even mean a little boost since it's a confirmation that the ending page is html, eg what the bots want to index.

Of course, some people will argue that since the url is shorter, the keyword's weight will increase, even by a slight bit, but again, if this was the kind of trick that would make a difference, SE would be a bit too easy to trick.

++

[BadBunny]

I would like to get rid of .html as well and have everything end with /

I changed php_seo_class.php so that .html is now / for each topic, forum, etc., but simply removing .html from the entries in .htaccess doesn't seem to do the trick.

Can somebody please tell me how I need to modify the default .htaccess to remove the .html and have each one end with / instead?

Board is unusable at the moment so I'd really appreciate hearing from someone.

Thanks!

[dcz]

The simple way is just to generate a new one, like you did the first time, after you changed the suffixes

++

[kd0bpv]

For those wanting to have it end with nothing, not even a /, it's really simple. Edit /phpbb_seo/includes/setup_phpbb_seo.php and locate this line (For me, it was on line 90):

Code: Select all

// $this->seo_ext['topic'] = '/'; // instead of the default ".html"

and change it to:

Code: Select all

$this->seo_ext['topic'] = ''; // instead of the default ".html"

Once that is done, go to the ACP->PHPBB SEO->.htaccess to generate a new .htaccess file and copy that over your current one.
I did this on my forum, and it works.