URLs in Yahoo & MSN Are Not Complete...

Feb 24, 2004 - 9:39 pm 0 by
Filed Under Yahoo News

While working on a little project that made a site completely database driven, I realized that Yahoo and MSN incorrectly strip off trailing slashes in URLs (because I started seeing 404 page not found errors in my web logs).

For example, the URL http://www.domain.com/directory/ is linked to as http://www.domain.com/directory from both MSN and Yahoo.

This is bad for two reasons... first of all, it's just plain wrong, the two URLs could in theory be separate documents. Second, it's a waste of bandwidth. Most web servers are configured to add a slash to the end of a URL if there is no file that matches the name, and there *is* a directory with that name via a HTTP redirect. So now, the end user's browser needs to make two requests to the server to get one document.

The reason I figured it out is I *had* directories at one point, but moved to dynamic, database driven content. So the web server wasn't redirecting them with the wrong URL because there was not a directory with that name any longer.

Bad MSN, bad Yahoo... Naughty, boys.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 28, 2024

Mar 28, 2024 - 4:00 pm
Google Ads

Google Ads Suspended 90% More Advertisers This Year & Removed 5.5 Billion Ads

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Updates Its Definition Of Top Ads; They May Not Be At The Top

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Adds Share Ad Preview For Performance Max

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Can Search For Your Blockchain Wallet Addresses (Bitcoin & More)

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:21 am
Google Maps

New Google Shopping & Maps Search Features

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Coming Soon at the Search Engine Roundtable