Don’t End Your URLs in .0, .exe, .tgz or .tar

Say No To Dot Zero

Some of this is obvious, some isn’t. Particularly the “.0” rule (dot zer0). This post discusses a few webmaster rules that your web team should be aware of.

It’s probably pretty obvious that you should not end any URL with .exe, .tgz or .tar (or probably anything that resembles a file extension). The main reason for this is to keep search engine users safe from viruses or trouble that lurks inside an executable file. It was definitely a wise decision upon the part of the major search engines to keep such URLs our of their index.

If for some reason your website needs to link to an application or compressed file, do not link directly to it from an unrelated page. Instead make a webpage that directly talks about the application or compressed file package. Then link to the file from the new descriptive webpage and add a nofollow attribute to the link. This technique is better because you can create a more search friendly landing page with a complete title tag, h1 heading and content related to the application or compressed file package. Finally, the nofollow tells the search engines not to travel to the link destination, which can prevent them from thinking you are hosting a malicious website.

But, what’s the deal with .0? A couple years ago, some folks realized that their search engine friendly URLs ending with “web-2.0” were not showing up in the Google index. News broke out in the SEO world about this strange phenomenon and Google decided to allow some important URLs ending in .0 back in their index. But for whatever reason, Google doesn’t like .0.

So to keep it simple, don’t have unnecessarily weird URLs. Try to stick to a simple convention like: http://www.yourdomain.com/search-friendly-url

This is one of those strange SEO practices that has no rhyme or reason, it’s just a strange occurrence that I guess you (or your webmaster) should keep in the back of your head, post-it-note or white board. 🙂

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