A URL is the address of a specific webpage or file on the Internet. For example, the URL of the PHPsupport website is http://www.phpsupport.co/. The URL of a website carries a lot of information to improve user recall and increase the websites SERP standing. An important part of a URL structure is the trailing slash at the end. This slash is often used to differentiate between a directory and a file on the website.
Generally, users do not treat a URL with and without a trailing slash as two distinct elements. However, for search engines, the presence or absence of trailing slash makes a huge difference. For example:
is crawled as a directory. Where, as
is considered a file.
Webmasters can improve the URL structure either manually or through tools such as friendly URL PrestaShop module, that automatically remove the special characters and makes sure that customers get to know the product or post’s name in no time.
What If we Add or Skip Trailing Slash?
The addition of a slash at the end of a URL instructs the web server to search for a directory. With the trailing slash, the server assumes that the request is a directory and not a file. This speeds the web page loading because the server will retrieve the content of the web page without wasting time searching for the file.
On the other hand, when the server is asked to search for a web address with a slash, it searches for a file mentioned in the URL. If the server is unable to find the relevant file, it goes to the directory with the similar name and serves the files within. However, this usually results in the retrieval of an inappropriate web page or, worse, a 404 Page Not Found error.
The problem arises in the case when the two URLs (with and without trailing slash) have different content. While Google treats the two URLs similarly and does not raise the question of duplicate content, this could be an issue for people who visit the website. It is often a surprise when the web page shows different content for URL with and without the trailing slash.
So, What to do?
To avoid confusing customers with two different pages, it is often best to use a preferred version (either with or without the trailing slash) of the URL. Generally, website managers go with https://example.com/directory/ rather than https://example.com/directory. However, webmasters and store owners are free to optimize for either version.
It is important to stick to the preferred version and enforce a common policy for all the URLs of the website, including those in the site map. To prevent showing multiple results to the visitors, set redirections to the preferred URLs.
[…] document has been received from the web server. One of the most common redirects is the missing trailing slash one. If the directory where the content is situated ends with a slash but the clickable URL […]
[…] document has been received from the web server. One of the most common redirects is the missing trailing slash one. If the directory where the content is situated ends with a slash but the clickable URL […]