Question

Can someone tell me 100% yes or no if ending the link with say .html is better for SEO?

Comments

100 % is difficult, but as far as I know, this is completely unimportant.

HTML pages in most cases are static and not dynamically "produced", so they are faster to read than php pages. This would have a positive effect on ranking in SE.
But if You rename through htaccess or somehow the php pages into html, it does not make them static, so I think this is a big error to think this would help on SEO.
If You can cache Your php sites on Your server, than they are as fast as static pages, and they rank the same i would say.

You may check any search term and compare the first results if You find more html pages or php pages. Just choose a very popular search term, where You can be sure that these sites are heavily optimized.

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Further to this topic, here is a interesting take from the horses mouth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSG6C33GwsE&feature=related

Answer 1

I just found the answer to my own question, I think!  The jury is still not decided, it seems 50/50 and comments like "Can't fool Google" make me think that it really doesn't matter!

HOWEVER, If you wan to follow standards/convention or whatever you would like to call it,  a report of the minutes of a meeting of W3C chair people suggest that this is the best example: http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chair

I hope this helps others who may have been wondering the same!

Answer 2

I can tell you 100% that it doesn't matter. Search engines handle all URLs just fine, especially any static-looking URLs.

There is no penalty for using ".html" when you're not returning actual .html files. But the html part is simply not needed. The way Q2A handles URLs is excellent, so don't worry about it.