Trailing slash what is

On the other hand, URLs without this special character indicated that the site was a file. The changes over the years were caused by the development of file structures. Directory pages with folders and files marked by the trailing slash have been replaced with templates storing the file structure, and dynamic files are used to form a page. This inconspicuous element may have a significant impact on your website position in the search results. In such a situation, Google finds it hard to determine the original source and everything gets pretty chaotic.

Therefore, choosing one URL that will represent given online content is the only solution to the issue. The best method to get rid of problems caused by the trailing slash is to avoid situations when the site has an equivalent to compete with. Setting appropriate redirects may be a key to success.

If a canonical tag points to a version of the page with a trailing slash and Google indexes a page this way, but the hreflang tags point to a version of the page without a trailing slash, then these hreflang tags may not be respected. This process will change depending on your system.

Reporting should be considered when determining whether to use a trailing slash or not. As a result, all visits to domain. You can add a filter as shown below to force trailing slashes on the URLs in your analytics reports if you want to consolidate the data. Patrick Stox. Article stats Monthly traffic Linking websites Tweets The number of times this article was shared on Twitter. An image showing how a webmaster can redirect directly to the preferred version without creating a redirect chain, as seen on DanielMorell.

Jump to: navigation , search. Category : Web Development. Navigation menu Search. Get the latest SEO and website quality news! Exclusive content and Ryte news delivered to your inbox, every month. A trailing slash is the forward slash placed at the end of a URL.

The trailing slash is generally used to mark a directory, and if a URL is not terminated using a trailing slash, this generally points to a file. However, these are guidelines, and not requirements. The process of setting a single trailing slash for directories has established itself as a standard over time.