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To slash or not to slash?

by markcb
4 replies
Hope someone cleverer than me can help here!

I have a potential client who has done a 301 redirect for all their domain urls to the same domain url only with a slash on it

eg

domainname.com redirected to domainname.com/

They have done this for every page of their 100 page website.

Can anyone tell me if there is a benefit or detriment to doing this? I believe that 301s do actually lose a little page rank (I read it somewhere from Matt Cutts) but I don't know anything about the forward slash.

Thanks!

Mark
#slash
  • Profile picture of the author DEaFeYe
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    • Profile picture of the author sitehero
      I'm not entirly sure what the issue is but as someone else said, the slash at the end of a TLD is irrelivent and down to personal choice. Also a 301 is a PERMINANT redirect which bares no relevance to SEO... Google and co all advise that 301's are okay.


      However, if I've understood your question correctly, and your potential client has re-directed all pages to ONE page, then yes, absolutly this will have a detremental effect because he/she will lose the rankings of all the pages that used to accessable.. If these pages are no longer accessable because of a redirect than you can't expect to hold onto the rankings of this content anymore

      Why would someone do that anyway? If they have a lot of incoming links to all the 100 pages then these will now go to the one page and you will probably see an improvement in that pages rankings but this will not be as powerful as the combined strength of all the 100 pages previously available.

      Hope this makes some sense.
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  • Profile picture of the author markcb
    Thanks very much for your replies, always appreciated!

    It is very odd. They have redirected every page to a new one with the slash. So that's 100 redirects to 100 new pages. I've not seen this before, and as you say I have no idea why someone would do this!

    Cheers!
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    Mark

    StormHour

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    • Profile picture of the author sitehero
      Originally Posted by markcb View Post

      Thanks very much for your replies, always appreciated!

      It is very odd. They have redirected every page to a new one with the slash. So that's 100 redirects to 100 new pages. I've not seen this before, and as you say I have no idea why someone would do this!

      Cheers!
      I'd say thats pretty risky if they've created 100 new pages. I also don't understand why anyone would want to do that. When I answered before I thought they was all directed to the same ONE page not 100 new pages. While Google say they don't mind perminant redirects I wouldn't take the risk of doing this on such a large scale without a very good reason.

      One good reason could be if they have installed some type of script that requires the TLD to have a slash. Its possible that a script needs that slash so it can then create more URLs, for example, having a slash after the TLD will allow a script to create a new URL by just adding a directory name after the TLD. It will basically save having to add the slash in the script but this is just a lot of work to save a few lines of code so it still doesn't make much sense really.
      TLD (with slash) + directory name = New Url

      This is the only reason I can think of. Or maybe the server needs to be checked for Malware just to be safe!! I'm puzzelled with this one. Sorry.
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      • Profile picture of the author condra
        Canonicalization.

        I think that's what it's called.

        I was reading about it recently here:
        SEO advice: url canonicalization
        (I have nothing to do with mattcutts by the way!)

        Anyway, I don't bother with it, but apparently I should.
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