Today's question comes from London. IanVisits asks, "Knowing that the keywords in a url is one of many factors used to rank a site, what about the impact of the filename suffix?
In theory, if I replaced .php with .free would that impact on search results?" I wouldn't recommend going to that lengths.
We'll typically crawl almost any filename extension.
There's a few like maybe .zero, or .exe, or something like that that we would definitely not recommend.
But taking a URL, and taking the .php or the .html and adding a .free, or .cheap on the end is probably going a little bit too far.
It's not something that I would really recommend.
Rather, I would look at ways to naturally work a keyword into the copy on the site, or the H1 tag, or the title tag,or whatever.
But probably, the number of users who saw that and thought that looked weird, or scuzzy, or strange, and didn't click, would counteract any potential benefit.
And I'm not sure that it would work all that well anyway.
So I would go ahead and use whatever filename suffix you think is appropriate: .php, .cfm, .aspx, .html, whatever.
But I wouldn't make it.cheaponlineviagra or something along those lines.
That's probably taking it a little bit too far.
Thanks.