Friendly URLs

[pauland]

One of the things that they recommended was to use "Friendly URLs". This one was a new one to me.

Perhaps what they actually meant was SEO friendly URLs rather than user-friendly URLs?

http://www.techterms.com/definition/friendly_url

So maybe what you need is: http://www.somesite.com/quality-furn...low-prices.htm rather than htttp://www.somesite.com/furniture ?

[derwalkerhaus]

I usually keep my URLs SEO friendly for the most part. But their advise was to "Remove the file extensions from the URL". I think "SEO Friendly URLs" like what you're saying work just as good as what they're asking for. Personally, I think that once you get to a certain point in dissecting the code that you're just being picky on their end. I'm sure they probably run his site through some website analysis software and just flags all the possible problems. But thanks for your input.

[pauland]

I think it's one of those cases where a "consultancy" company has to make recommendations to justify their fee and this is a simple recommendation that could involve a fair amount of hassle to do, be prone to error and is of questionable value, particularly with respect to the effort involved to do it in the first place and in ongoing maintenance.

[KultiVator]

One suggestion that *might* give you the result you're after:

1) Structure your website so that each section/page has its own folder.

2) Each section in each folder then has it's own index.htm file. e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/products/index.htm

3) You can then point to the products page simply by linking to www.yourwebsite.com/products

This works because browsers will automatically search for a file called index.htm / index.html if no explicit filename is given at the web path you specify.

It perhaps means you'd need to upload the website semi-manually, rather than relying on Xara's own in-built publishing tools though - so perhaps wise to weigh up the pros and cons by way of some experimentation before making the final judgement.

Good luck moving this project forwards.

[derwalkerhaus]

Thank you.
I might have to resolve to that if I'm not able to adjust it on the server side.

[Egg Bramhill]

From looking over several pages re this subject I'd suggest that it doesn't matter at all in SEO.

Here's the best answer I could find.

[derwalkerhaus]

I totally agree. I have not found any official word from Google stating that this has any merit on their searches. The only thing that Google mentions in their "Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide" is that you may want to "Allow for the possibility of a part of the URL being removed" as a way to navigate to an area on your site. ie:

He or she might be visiting http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com...card-shows.htm, but then enter
http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/2010/ into the browser's address bar, believing that this will show all news from 2010

[horse3farm]

I have the same problem. The IP is GoDaddy and on a Linux server. The code Acorn lists for .htacess file does not work.

I did what KultiVator suggests:

I made a new .web file with the one page, uploaded it to the site. Then I linked to the url and unchecked "correct automatically". It worked. However, it put a trailing /. Apparently the vendor doesn't want the trailing slash. Is there a way to fix that?

Also, couldn't I just publish my entire site into a folder and the .htm would disappear from all pages?

Thanks.