I have some questions regarding the following 2 URL formats that I've seen in some websites: domain-name-dot-com.com/Folder/ domain-name-dot-com.com/Folder 1) What do you need to do to make the trailing slash from the first format disappear and display it like the second URL format? 2) Would these 2 URL formats represent 2 totally different URLs in the eyes of the search engines? 3) If 2) is the case, what other drawbacks are there when getting rid of the trailing slash? Any feedback will be appreciated.
Google used to have an issue with trailing slashes. There was a thread here a while back that referred to the same page being listed twice in Google's SERPS, one with and one without the slash, but they since fixed the problem.
Okay, come to the point: As per you have mentioned, there two URL's domain-name-dot-com.com/Folder/ domain-name-dot-com.com/Folder ---- it makes the difference of returning a “200 OK†status code or a “301 Moved Permanently†(or other) status code when the page is requested. The location of these two URL's are totally different. If anyone use redirection in between these 2 URL's then only the both URL can land in the same page. Let's discuss one common thing: If anyone store a file in his/her hard drive C and the total location is C./Folder name/File name Now if anybody want to open the file directly from the browser bar by writing "C./Folder name/" - is it open that particular file? No, Not at all. In this case you have only entered in the Folder. But for opening the particular file you have to double click on that file name. So here we can see, these two things are totally different. And for SEO, I can only say that in the recent times Google has updated their algorithm in a large way. So Google is smart enough for detecting this kind of errors. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter for SEO: many web servers will just re-direct using 301 status code to the default version; Some web servers may return a 404 page for the non-trailing-slash address = wasted link juice and efforts; Some web servers may return 302 redirect to the correct version = wasted link juice and efforts; Some web servers may return 200 response for both the versions = wasted link juice and efforts as well as potential duplicate content problems.
Well the trailing slash / defines to look inside the directory while no trailing slash indicates that it is a file itself yourwebsite.com/folder/ (search inside this directory) yourwebsite.com/folder (this is a file and crawler is not going inside) Though it is a pretty old concept discussion as these days crawlers can be stopped only by robots.txt to index your pages, folders etc....