Paging and SEO with numeric file extension

[fixxation]

Hi,

I posted a thread bout six months ago abot paging, and got some great replies but now I have another problem where the system I was going to go with wouldn't quite work and I just wanted to see what you all think about this as an alternative, and whether or not search engines would look down on this.

I was originally having my URLs rewritten to be something like this:

hotelsite.com/toronto-1
hotelsite.com/toronto-2
hotelsite.com/toronto-3
etc, etc...

...where the last number is the current page of hotels that the user is viewing. However, we may need to add locations to the database the contain a number at the end of the string, and then this makes it more confusing to deal with when I parse the URL. So I was thinking of making a fake extension which is actually the page number instead, like this:

hotelsite.com/toronto.1
hotelsite.com/toronto.2
hotelsite.com/toronto.3

Does anyone see any reason why URLs like that wouldn't be cached by search engines? It would make it so much easier to work with if we did it something like that. Could this perhaps be an ever better alternative, as the search engines may ignore file entensions entirely?

Thanks for the help,
A.

 

[Damion]

I'm not that very technical but is even remotely possible to have a URL like hotelsite.com/toronto.1 resolve?
Unless there is some sort of .htaccess redirect in place to catch these invalid requests?

.1 isn't a valid file extension right?

Could this perhaps be an ever better alternative, as the search engines may ignore file entensions entirely?

A page with 2 different file extensions is being recognized as two unique pages on it's own despite of having the same content.

File extensions would never be ignored as it is a intrinsic part of Google and other SE's to recognize pages.
Also URL consistency is important, when you have a LOT of different type of URL's it isn't as helpful than having consistent file extensions.

Keep it consistent and you should be all right.

 

[WebHostingBuzz]

file extantions show you and everyone which language or application was used to create this soft.

 

[Keral_Patel]

Assuming you are using somthing like this

hotelsite.com/toronto-1.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-2.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-3.html

And now you want other locations in toronto itself, and same with other places.

You can use :

hotelsite.com/toronto-1-1.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-1-2.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-1-3.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-2-1.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-2-2.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-2-3.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-3-1.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-3-2.html
hotelsite.com/toronto-3-3.html


Thanks.

 

[fixxation]

Damion, Nick,

Thanks for the replies, that's perfect- I think I'll go with a standard as you have suggested, just to keep it all consistant.

Cheers
A.

 

[quyloc]

it's surely because of toronto.1. The server code always parse everything after "dot" as the file extension to give out exact code to read it. Your file extension is 1, so it cannot understand

 

[fixxation]

I'm creating my own search engine friendly URLs using ModRewrite, and then sending the entire query string of folder & filenames into a variable that gets passed into the main index.php file, so really, anything could work as I do all the work in the index.php file to determine what the user should see. The server is always loading the index.php file on every single request, except for images and client-side includes (js, css, etc).

This is mainly why I was curious about a .1 approach, so that I wouldn't have to mix the page numbers in the actual filenames of the "virtual" pages...

Thanks,
A.