Trailing Slash Issues - Normalizing URLs the Wrong Way

[rustybrick]

We have a featured thread at the Google forum on Is A Trailing / On A Directory Seen As A Differnet File By Google? (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=3129).

Today I found an interesting real life case of the issues with URL normalization with our friendly search engine Yahoo.

Let's do a search on Festive Bowties (http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=Festive+Bowties) and you will see my client Smart Tuxedo, which I discussed in my Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Design From Ground Up (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2139) post that got me some nice rep points. :)

Anyway, the Yahoo Festive Bowties (http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=Festive+Bowties) search brings up smarttuxedo.com/Festive-Bowties-15 with no trailing slash. I can tell you, that my developers have verified that all links internally use the trailing slash for those pages. So all traffic to those pages from Yahoo went to a 404 page. We will fix that on our side, that it maps to the correct page, not a big deal for us to do.

So you see, Yahoo normalized the URL and stripped off the trailing slash. This had a major impact, not on rankings, but on click throughs going to a 404 page. That reminds me, I should make a custom 404 for smart tuxedo.

That real life cases that I am sharing with everyone. Tim, when you get back from your holiday, let us know your thoughts please.

[orion]

I did a search for color optimization (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=color+optimization&ei=ISO-8859-1&fr=sfp&fl=0&x=wrt) in Yahoo and it shows two cases from the webreference.com site with no trailing slashes shown in the url entries and as follows

in position #3 and #9 out of 827,000

www.webreference.com/dev/graphics
www.webreference.com/dev/gifanim


and these pages are well accessible.

I believe Yahoo removes the trailing slash from the search results to conform to a uniformed format. This should not cause sites to lose traffic. If this is happening then there must be other reason(s). Tim, where are you? :)

Orion

[rustybrick]

I did some more research and learned that this was happening since at least mid-february.

I blame Yahoo for not using the links i gave them (i.e. I used trailing slashes). Who is Yahoo to tell me, "no, I am going to strip those slashes from you".

Anyway, I fixed it on my side.

Reason it occurred was because I used mod_rewrites to make those URLs.

[uberdose]

I realized this about 6 months before with yahoo and msn. It's not too good an idea because there is a fundamental difference between /url/ and /url in most server setups ...

[seomike]

I've been complaining about this for months now. I even wrote a mod rewrite tutorial on the subject to correct the problem. I'll see if I can find a link.