Dave,

I like them if they indicate content type and not the implementation. Implementation to me means advertizing the tool used to make a content type and is totally irrelevant to a URL: php, jsp, asp etc. html is a content type.

Here is an admitedly older article about page extensions and google rank:
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**http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/125/index.php
*Dynamic Pages*
This is another issue that is a gamble. Google will index file types including html, pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfml, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri. The problem with this is certain file types and extensions are more likely to rank better and are more optimizable. Google has officially stated that it will only index a certain amount of dynamically generated pages, which includes URLs with a query string, as a result of server issues....
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I know google does lots of computation on the URL - that is why putting those tags in the URL will be great :) Wether or not they still base content type of of extension or metadata I don't know - it used to be that they threw out all metadata since it was heavily spoofed.

So overall - I would be reticent to throw away extensions - I think they add clarity - and Google may too...

-John

David M Johnson wrote:


On May 3, 2006, at 4:49 PM, John Hoffmann wrote:

Yes, you hit on a pet peeve. Extensions for content type not implementation.

When designing the JavaOne web site 5 years ago we made every page available in 4 formats which was controlled by the extension.

standard ones:
javaone/2001/session-1234/detail.html   (for desktop browser visitors)
javaone/2001/session-1234/detail.xml (for crawling by 3rd party data harvesters)

two custom types:
javaone/2001/session-1234/detail.lite     (for small screen devices)
javaone/2001/session-1234/detail.prt     (for printing)



John, are you saying that you are for or against file extensions?

- Dave


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