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Yahoo developer: "Dude, without the slash it looks way cooler!"

A red crab: "Nope. Stealing trailing slashes is a brain dead approach that produces crap and damages search engine rankings."
10 Comments     

Comments

from dannysullivan 515 days ago #
Votes: 3 | Vote:
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Dude, it does look way cooler. Or, more understandable. Believe me, there are still people who read out URLs on the radio like "h t t p colon backslash backlslash domain dot co dot uk dot backslash" and people who still grapple with URLs. In print, or any place I think I'm going to deal with a newbie, I tend to drop the trailing slash to keep it simple. But online, you bet, I'm with you, that slash is there.

from baiduyou 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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For me it looks like the site is down at the moment.

EDIT: Working now.

from Sebastian 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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You're right Danny. I really should add that URLs in print, radio, and offline in general should be truncated in a way that browsers can figure out the location - "domain dot co dot uk" is enough.

from Sebastian 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Baiduyou, a whole legion of stumblers tickles the database. ;)

from baiduyou 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Glad to see your excellent articles are getting the traffic they so richly deserve ;)


from Sebastian 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Thank you, Baiduyou. :) 

from bwelford 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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A great article, Sebastian. Unfortunately like the www. versus non-www debate, it's something where some  humans will think it should look good to them and hang the spiders needs.

from SlightlyShadySEO 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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@Sebastian: Excellent, excellent point. I was crawling around the web recently and noticed a few people actually killing the slash, and including a  "." in their directory name....talk about confusion...

from Sebastian 515 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Thanks Barry + Shady. :)  
It's not only about spider needs, it can result in actual traffic losses.

from Sebastian 514 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Thanks Edward, and thanks for the link :)


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