Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?

[Jseddon92]

Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first.

I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs.

For example

website.com/category/sub-category.html

Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/

We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings.

By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category?

Second question:

If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case.

For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category

Duplicate content/pages?

[Gyorgy.B]

Similarly to any link, not just 301:

"The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link."

So 301s are just fine.

[EGOL]

Matt Cutts said, in 2013, that about 15% of pagerank is lost through a 301 redirect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

[Jseddon92]

Thanks for the speedy answer, I had suspected the same thing so I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion. Thanks for your help.

[Gyorgy.B]

Hi Joshua

subcategory.htm pages will perform just as well as subcategory/ and having .htm in the URL doesn't affect link juice flow at all. .htm or .html are perfectly valid HTML files; however, some prefer having shorter, "nicer" looking URLs. If this is the case and the website is still in the early stages of SEO, then 301 redirect the .htm URLs and make sure every navigation elements links to the non-htm URLs in the future.

In some cases, the slash ending URLs can be considered duplicate pages (even though I'm pretty sure Google will understand the honest mistake), so it's one of the basic SEO recommendations to set redirections and make sure the website navigation doesn't mix the two. Also, SEO tools will keep sending you duplicate page title warnings, so it's better to clean it up as soon as possible.

Hope it helps.