Helping Webmasters To Decide The Slash Factor In Urls

Webmasters have often encountered a very typical issue of trailing slash at the end of a URL

. As per the coding standard, a slash at the end of the URL indicates a directory, and no slash indicates a file.

With the official announcement of Google, this issue has been finally resolved. For example, www.xyz.com/level1/, indicates a directory and www.xyz.com/level1 indicates a file. As per the recent blog from Google, both of these URL versions are treated the same manner.

With this clarification, it is apparent that technically it is OK to include a slash or not to include a slash at the end of the URL, as Google treats both of these as same. But, for a user this may create confusion. For example, if the user finds out that links www.xyz.com/level1 and www.xyz.com/level1/ contain different content, then he or she may get confused. Thus, it is preferable to have the same content in the URLs with slash or without slash, when the website has a directory structure implanted. For example, www.xyz.com/level1/ and www.xyz.com/level1 should be populated with the same content to diffuse the confusion for the user.

The optimal situation for the Google crawler to rank a website is when one of the URLs open the requested web page (200 response code), and the other URL redirects to the first URL. This will suggest that no duplicate content is present, thus improved ranking. If both the versions of the URL return a 200 response code, then it indicates that duplicate content is present as both the URLs are presenting the same information. Webmaster should attempt to change such situation and bring in the redirect model. However, it is not a compulsion. Google has the necessary technology to track duplicate content.

However, if both the URLs gives a 200 response code, then the Google will identify this as a case of duplicate content. Such situation should be avoided by the webmasters, and redirect model should be made preferable. However, this is not a necessity. Google has the required technology to differentiate duplicate content.

Google also recommends to implement a 301 redirect from the URL without slash to the preferred URL. Next, it is required to check the 301 and 200 results. Note that the preferred URL should return 200 code and the other URL without slash should 301 redirect to the first one. The webmasters can use the Fetch as GoogleBot option in the Webmasters Tool. Finally, the user should check for the Crawl Errors in the Webmasters Tool and as the last check, the webmasters log for the final confirmation for the 301 implementation need to be observed.

by: Shane Watson

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