Adding .html to the URL while it is not a HTML page hurt to SEO?

Question

If I added .html to the URLs of my website while the pages are not in HTML, will it hurt SEOof my site or will it be helful to my site in search engine rankings?

For example, say my domain is www.example.com which is a question and answers site, here I created a page which dynamically shows the answers of the questions, and the questions are populated from my database, so URLs are created dynamically, for example:

www.example.com/answer/my-question-no-1
www.example.com/answer/my-question-no-2

Here the questions my-question-no-1 and my-question-no-2 are from database, and I created a single page for hundreds or thousands questions.

So my question is for better SEO results Should my URL be like www.example.com/answer/my-question-no-1 or Changing the URL to www.example.com/answer/my-question-no-1.html will improve my site ranking in search engines?

Answer 1

There is no benefit in one kind of file over the other. So no change on the extension of the file would make a difference.

In any case, if when a request for http://www.example.com/answer/my-question-no-1 is interpreted for a server side language, like PHP, ASP, perl, etc that generates certain load, if you change that to http://www.example.com/answer/my-question-no-1.html, you are adding, most probably, a layer of processing to the server since Apache, or whichever web server installed would have to use rewriting rules to parse that information.

If you can skip the web server, not doing any extra rewrite, then the request would go to the same file, index.php for instance, that is doing the processing now, but that file would have to remove the extension, which is not much work, but is unnecessary.

Conclusion, don't do it, there is no benefit at all but could be some drawbacks.