Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Hi everyone,

When creating links to your homepage, is it best to have a trailing slash in the link or not? I.e., should it be like this (ignore the space between the www and the dot):

www . mydomain.com

or

www . mydomain.com/

It seems like when you type in the url in your browser WITHOUT the trailing slash, it gets added anyway...

[laservers]

Re: Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

I think it matters and always go with what Aaron Wall and Wikipedia do. 301 redirect from one to the other. Watch what happens when you visit the following link (has no slash: http://www.seobook.com/glossary

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

Hmmm...

Just did a search on "Prince Charles" and, of course, Wikipedia's listing came up number one - ahead of the official web site for prince charles even

The URL is quit "unconventional" in SEO terms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles,_Prince_of_Wales

Since most SEO people say to use hyphens instead of underscores, and most say to NEVER use a comma in a URL, I am beginning to think that URL syntax might have precious little to do with actual search engine placement.

One thing to note is that the page title, H1, and first line of text in the first paragraph all have the same thing, which is also at the end of the URL:

Charles, Prince of Wales (in the URL, the spaces are replaced with underscores instead of hyphens or plus signs)

So I am guessing that IF there really is a google overoptimization penalty, it is harder to trigger than by having the same keywords in the page title, H1, leading text, and URL

[laservers]

Re: Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

As far as trailing slashes go, Wikipedia seems to use no slash consistently but doesn't use rewrites. Check out the difference in pagerank between:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_..._optimization/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

I always use a slash and rewrites but I think consistency is probably the key for best chance of not getting tagged for duplicate content.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

It kinda matters. a trailing slash denotes a folder. without it, it can be construed to be a query string or a file name.

Some sites use a query string that looks like that. mydomain.com/something
while on some sites "something" is a folder...
so.. if you want to be technically correct, you would put a slash (unless it's a query string).
If you don't.. then don't.
It really depends on how your host has your server setup too. Servers can be setup so that without a slash.. if a file of that name doesn't exist, they'll assume it's a folder. But all that checking for possibilities takes some cpu time. The busier your site gets, the more impact this will have. Most small sites won't notice it.. but.. I hope yours will someday!


The key is to be really consistent and do it the same way everywhere. Both in links within your site and links you put into emails and links you ask others to put on their sites back to yours.

I would advise use the slash if it really is a folder.

an extra note... then if you did put a file into the webroot with the same name as a folder.. those urls won't start getting that file instead of the folder you had always intended. Remember on apache.. file extensions don't matter.

[Biffy]

Re: Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

They are treated as separate pages as you can see in the link reports. Use canonical links to eliminate any ill effects and then link 'em any way you wish.

[Brandon MUS]

Re: Google questions: Should you have a trailing slash?

That slash thing irritated me, so I wrote this lil number:

# Redirect DirectoryIndex filenames to pure directory calls to remove canonical urls
# - known issues: POST requests are ignored because the headers cannot be forwarded
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !POST
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?index\.([a-zA-Z0-9]{3,4})$ /$1 [R=301,L]

The basic idea of this code is that it will take "/dir/index.html" or "/dir" and redirect it to "/dir/". It's kind of tailored for my setup, but you can tweak the index part if you use home or default or something similar. It also works with mydomain.com => mydomain.com/