Ultimate SEO URLs - Remove .html?

[Alex Clarke]

I've setup Ultimate SEO URLs on my 1.3.0.2 ZenCart, but would like to remove the .html extention that is displayed for pages (in the address bar).

For Example, a cusomer click on the cart link and is sent to:

www.example.com/shopping_cart.html

But, I would like the address bar to read:

www.example.com/shopping_cart

I understand that this would require editing the .htaccess file (i think), but I don't know how!

Any advice would be great. Thanks.

[Reesy]

You want to .html there for search engine reasons.
I wouldnt recommend removing it.

[Alex Clarke]

You want to .html there for search engine reasons.
I wouldnt recommend removing it.

Thanks for the reply. Does it really affect search engines that much?

[Alex Clarke]

Also, is it possible to remove the category and product codes from the url?

I'm thinking that this should not be a problem (since no two categories or products have the same names).

At the moment my urls read:

www.example.com/batteries-c-56.html

Anyway to get rid of the 'c-XXX'?

[Mircose]

did u manage to get an answer for your question??

I am also interested about it..

please let me know if u find out..
thanks

[ericny]

I have a similiar question.

[FONT=Helv]I am using SEO URL and i would like to find out if it is possible to add custom text into the html path. For example right now product links are generated as www.mysite.com\product1.html

i would like it to say
www.mysite.com\MY_TEXT-product1.html

I suppose a concatenate statement needs to be changed in one of the php files but i do not know which one.
[/FONT]

[BlessIsaacola]

If you will post in the Ultimate SEO URL thread you probably will get better response.

[dontknowwhatimdoing]

You want to .html there for search engine reasons.
I wouldnt recommend removing it.

You are just flat out wrong. Even if the comment was made a year or so ago, it was based on a complete misconception. Having .html does not give more value to your page. Having things such as an XHTML valid page, or well written page does.

Be careful about the SEO advice you give.

If you for example, tried the Wordpress CMS you would see that they remove ALL extensions from URLS, and simply end with trailing slashes e.g. "/"

Why does this help?

I have one theory--extensions such as .html or .php serve no purpose, and having only kewords in a URL make it focused, or in other words, there's less invalid garbage for a search engine to sort through.

Anyway, the current trend at least with CMS systems like Wordpress is to remove .html from pages--because it serves no purpose.

--Question--
Is there a post somewhere explaining how to remove .html from URLs with the ultimate SEO url mod? or can someone please post a link. I've been searching on that thread & on google--but I just found this thread with no answer.

here's the thread: (but I don't see the answer to my question)
http://forum.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?t=44104

[dontknowwhatimdoing]

Alright-- I got this for you--hopefully you'll see this reply.

I've successfully removed ".html" from all my links.

I changed pages from:
http://mysite.com/microsoft-internet...-ps2-p-25.html
TO
http://mysite.com/microsoft-internet-keyboard-ps2-p-25/

I replaced ".html" with "/" on every page.

Here's the steps--they must be followed exactly:

as a precaution, backup each page before you edit
for example:
I saved a copy of seo.url.php as seo.url_bak.php

1-find seo.url.php under catalog/includes/classes

replace each instance of ".html" with "/"
I suppose you can leave out the commented PHP that mentions its using ".html" as the default, but everything else has to go.

2-go to your .htaccess file
replace each instance of .html with "/"

3-Go to your mySQL database with phpMyAdmin or whatever mysql editor you use, find the table "seo_cache"
(you may want to back the table up first, however, I think there's no danger in making this change)
Click on all the information/ entries in "seo_cache"
on the dropdown choose "drop"
OR
Clear the SEO URL cache from the admin panel (sadly, I dont know how to do this)


Now click on your homepage/ or your catalog primary page....

Things should be working with no ".html" in the pages. Just beautiful trailing slashes & clean URLs... now I just have to figure out how to get rid of those garbage category numbers...

It's critical that you clear the cache--I tried doing this without the cache clear, and I was finding all 'blank' or 'empty' pages.

I hope others find this fix useful.

[dontknowwhatimdoing]

I've noticed there's a problem with EZpages, I think at least in my case, I'm just not going to use them to avoid the difficulty, unless someone has a simple solution.