Fix Internal Linking to Get Extensionless Urls Working Properly and Avoid Duplicate Content

[SomeEnormousBear]

Extensionless URLs means having e.g. /some-page instead of /some-page.html. They are shorter, easier to remember, more attractive, and they enable the internal file extension to be changed at a later date (e.g. if changing .html pages to be .php or whatever).

Duplicate content is having the same page being served up at multiple URLs, for example akita.community/ and akita.community/index. For various reasons this is not great for SEO.

At present the website sort of has extensionless URLs, but they are being done with 302 redirects. As an example, internal links to the /how-to-buy page are actually all pointing to /how-to-buy.html and then being 302 redirected to /how-to-buy. 302 redirects used in this way are bad for SEO. They add a little extra lag between page loads for the user too. It was good to get something working quickly so that external links (from other sites) could point to /how-to-buy instead of /how-to-buy.html, but it's not ideal as a permanent solution.

Internal links are also pointing to /index.html instead of / and this is causing duplicate content in the sense that the same page is available at two URLs. This is probably not a huge issue, but it's not ideal either, and should be fixed.

The typical solution to both these problems would be to use a web server when developing and testing locally. But for this project it is considered important that people are able to download and edit/experiment with the website quickly and easily, and requiring that a web server be installed adds extra complexity and ramp-up time for new developers. But these problems should still be fixed. I have an alternative solution in mind that I will submit a pull-request with shortly.