Trailing slash in URL

[philiporchard]

Just a quick question...

From experience, should URLs hav a trailing slash or not?

i.e. if you search for 'tailors in cardiff', I think our search results page is around No.14 at present, and our URL is:

http://www.cardiff.co.uk/2527-Local-Services/2979-Tailors-in-Cardiff/

(Just to say, the page would work just as well with out it)


I read an inetresting article here, but not sure how reliable...
http://www.ragepank.com/articles/68/that-trailing-slash-does-matter/

Thanks for any thoughts

 

[retired_member34]

I went round in circles on this question for a long time. My conclusion, rightly or wrongly, was that it does not matter to Google (or anyone else) as long as you are consistent in your linking structure, and as long one is 301'd to the other - you should not let both work.

In the linked article both urls work, and Google has correctly identified them as two different urls - they are different urls with identical content. G has then decided, again correctly as it is the url used on the site's own link structure, that the url with the trailing slash is the one to produce in the results, and the url without in the supplemental. If the site owner had used an internal linking structure that did not use a slash, then G probably would have reversed the results. His mistake is assume G prefers one over the other, it doesn't.

In your case simply choose which you prefer and 301 the other to it (and many prefer the trailing slash - I tried to keep my urls as simple as possible so omitted them). If you do not have 301 capability in your url rewriting (you should) then at the very least use a rel="canonical" in the one you do not want to use. It is the same as any other duplicate content issue really.

All IMHO and all that..

 

[peter_w]

+1 to the above.

 

[philiporchard]

Thanks for the replies...

I was reading that a trailing slash meant that the file was actually a folder, which isn't the case with my pages..

Secondly I wondered if people linking to the page with remember to add the trailing slash.. if the pages weren't the same, then that wouldn't be an ideal situation, as you'd be leaking any PR to a page that wasn't linked to in your site.

 

[retired_member34]

I was reading that a trailing slash meant that the file was actually a folder, which isn't the case with my pages..

The distinction is not important. Is http://www.cardiff.co.uk/ a folder, or a page? G views everything as distinct webpages.

Secondly I wondered if people linking to the page with remember to add the trailing slash.. if the pages weren't the same, then that wouldn't be an ideal situation, as you'd be leaking any PR to a page that wasn't linked to in your site.

Some will include it, some won't, either way there is a leak which is one reason to 301 from one to the other. For a long url they are going to copy and paste it anyway - no one will type out http://www.cardiff.co.uk/2527-Local-Services/2979-Tailors-in-Cardiff/ correctly.

 

[philiporchard]

Thanks for the replies...

It just bothers me a bit that if I run a site on Google, and see which pages are indexed for Cardiff.co.uk, it seems that the pages that are listed first don't have a trailing slash... My key pages that have trailing slash, seem a lot further down the pecking order - although this may be because of the site structure more than any other reason.

 

[Retired_member41]

Looking at google, is it not just a case that it's masking the .aspx(.html etc) as it has done now for a few years?

So the Main structure which are .aspx show with a trailing slash and the ones which are more content show without?

 

[GotLiveChat]

Seems the trailing slash is appropriate when referencing a sub-directory. Obviously not added when URL points to a specific web page, but it's really up to you if you want to add it to the end of the main domain. It's usually seen on the end if used as http://www.somsite.com/ but not www.somesite.com/