Don’t end your urls with .exe, .dll or .tgz - Google
There was recently a buzz regarding the web 2.0 award held by Seomoz.org after which the PR7 page got completely de-indexed from Google and the PR7 changed to a complete gray bar. First there was no reason that strongly could hold the answer for it, but then the SEO’s after some research could just conclude that it was the “0″ ending in the URL that led to the penalty.
Then Jane from Seomoz had kept in touch with Google and they have finally come to a conclusion that URL ending with a “0″ will not be in the index of Google and that’s why the web 2.0 awards pages were penalized. Rand got in touch with Google and was advised that changing the URL so it doesn’t end in “.0″ would be a wise decision. Google would prefer not to make an official or public comment about this issue. After a lot of investigation by SEO, it was found that it’s not just inadvisable, but literally impossible to get a URL indexed in Google’s engine if it ends with a .0 similar to how Google won’t index file extensions ending in .exe, .dll or .tgz
Later on, Matt Cutts reported in is blog, that they finally allow and crawling pages with 0 ending URLs.
Here is what Matt says and I coat -
“Even though urls ending in “.0? are often binary and therefore end up getting dropped later in our indexing pipeline, it’s always good to revisit old decisions and respond to feedback by running new tests. So just in the last day or so, we switched it so that Google is willing to crawl pages that end in in “.0?. This will help the small number of pages out on the web that want to serve up HTML pages with a “.0? extension.
- An easy was to use the filetype: operator, so that you can decide whether to avoid a particular filename extension yourself.
- Google is willing to revisit old decisions and test them again, which is what we’re doing with the “.0″ filetype extension.”
But still, Google will not be able to crawl web content that ends with extensions such as .exe, .tgz or .dll etc. as that all has binary data which can not be entirely crawled and so they are just termed as “Meaningless blobs” according to Matt, this kind of extensions are mostly binary i.e not-very-indexable files, so avoid URLs ending with binary files extensions, for crawl by Google.
After the revisit of old decision and switched to crawl pages that end with .0 the Seomoz.org web 2.0 page now got PR again but it PR6 and not PR7 again.
