Ask HN: Is removing. HTML, .php, etc...bad for SEO in 2020?

2 points·Mike_Andreuzza··5 comments

I just removed my websites .html extension and is affecting gloriously my traffic, I would say.

Should I submit the new url on Google Search console?

The site. - https://www.colorsandfonts.com

Is hosted on netlify.

thank you / Mike

The problem is not the lack of extensions, but the fact you changed existing URLs. So now every existing URL looks like a dead link, which google does not like. Make sure you 301 any existing URLs to the new ones (should be fairly easy since it’s an obvious structure of extension to no extension)

Have you just removed the extensions, or have you permanently redirected the traffic, marked both urls as same, etc.

There are third-party-documented changes to the algorithm, like https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change where you can see what matters these days.

Things like extensions should be meaningless for decades now.

Hey, well, 2 days ago actually. I have redesign the whole site and I uncluded that.

Ok..I was wondering if I should go to the Google Search Console and ask it to crawl them again...

Yes resubmit to google search console. Google will index them anyway at some point but better to resubmit yourself. Also make sure robots.txt is setup correctly as needed.

Note: I noticed you still have an old sitemap.xml that shows the .html urls. I am not sure how that affects things but you may want to do a new sitemap as well ?

Ok.Will definately do that...

I haven't thought about the XML actually, good catch.

Well, robots.txt should be fine though or you mean I should be changing because I removed the .html extension.

Thank you for helping out.

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