Which Ranks Higher: .html, .shtml, .php or ???
by Jon Ricerca
A
few days ago, I read a post on one of those SEO boards asking
about how to hide that you are using SSI by using a .htaccess
file. The poster was convinced that .shtml files would rank lower
than .html files, so they wanted to create .html files, but still
have them parsed for SSI.
I've
seen similar posts where people are trying to hide that they are
using PHP or ASP for their sites. Somehow, they are convinced
that pages ending in .html are going to rank higher than pages
ending in something else. Are they right? No! In fact, .html is
the worst extension you can have for ranking well on the leading
search engine.
Let's
get into how we did the study. I gathered the results of the queries
I naturally performed last month using the leading search engine
and analyzed the URLs of the results. The endings were sorted
and tabulated for the first 10 rankings and converted into a normalized
"ranking correlation."
The
resulting number shows each stem extension normalized to a number
between -100 and +100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower.
A
value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order
to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank HIGHER than
pages of another size. A value of -100 shows that all 10 rankings
were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size
ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another size.
Numbers
in between show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally
between -100 and +100. That is the number you see on the Y-axis.
On
the X-axis, we have various stem extensions. I found many other
extensions, but I didn't have a sufficient sample size to accurately
calculate a ranking correlation.
Here
is the graph:
The
far right attribute on the X-axis shows results that had no stem
whatsoever (otherwise known as home pages). I included it to show
why all of the other bars are in the negative. The leading search
engine really prefers home pages to any sub-pages!
The
attribute just left of that shows pages that had a stem, but didn't
have an ending at all. They were subdirectories that ended in
a slash. Although the result is negative, this turns out to be
the very best page extension for ranking in this study.
So;
what happened to our .html pages? Yep; that's right. They turn
out to be the very worst! Trying to disguise PHP, ASP or SSI (shtml)
pages as .html pages turns out to be a very, very counter-productive
exercise. Once again, the popular belief is shown to be completely
inaccurate with this study.
Notes:
1.
Over 1,000 queries were examined for this study.
2.
There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords.
I merely took a random sampling of the queries I performed during
the month.
Conclusion:
Sub-pages
ending in a slash rank higher than any stem extension on the leading
search engine! Sub-pages ending in .html and .htm tie for ranking
the lowest of any page extension studied!
This
is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from
this study whether the leading search engine purposefully entertains
this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that this search
engine does, in fact, rank sub-pages ending in a slash higher
than sub-pages ending in .html, .htm, .php, .asp or .shtml.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
