Ever found a URL ending with “.0” (that’s ‘dot zero’) when searching for an item in Google? Back in 2008, when I wrote this, you probably hadn’t, because it seemed impossible to get a URL that ends with “.0” listed in the Google search-result pages. (To be clear up front: that’s no longer the case. Google indexes those URLs perfectly fine today, so this post is now just a curiosity from the early SEO days.)
Here’s something to try: search for “Windows 1.0” in Google, and in Yahoo. While Yahoo will show a result from Wikipedia, with the following URL "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0
", Google would not. And it’s not because the page wasn’t popular, or because no one linked to it (it had over a thousand inbound links at the time). It seemed Google simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, index those URLs ending with .0 . That has since been fixed: today the Windows_1.0 page is indexed and ranks for that exact query.
Google search: Wikipedia Windows 1.0
Yahoo search: Wikipedia Windows 1.0
At the time, this could pose some problems for websites that wished to publish software (think versions as 1.0, 2.0, …), or other articles relating to “x.0”. It was easily resolved by changing the URL of course, but for automatic software that creates URLs (think WordPress, Joomla), that was a hard thing to do.
The workarounds back then were rewriting the URL, or making sure the same page with an added “/” worked too (so you’d make “mysite.com/blabla_1.0” also accessible at “mysite.com/blabla_1.0**/**”). None of that is needed anymore: Google indexes .0 URLs without any special handling, so this is purely a snapshot of an early-SEO quirk.