NYCPHP Meetup

[inforequest]

Rob Marscher rmarscher-at-beaffinitive.com |nyphp dev/internal group 
use| wrote:

> On Aug 6, 2007, at 7:28 PM, inforequest wrote:
>
>> For me (a search engine optimizer) the core questions come later...  
>> how does that MVC front controller handle "exceptions" like:
>> /news/2007 (missing params) -> should 301 to default URL like /news/ 
>> 2007/01/01/ or throw a 404
>
> Unless you have a separate virtual resource that shows an archive of  
> news for 2007 and not the january 1 entries, right?
>
>> /news/2007/07/07 (no trailing slash) -> 301 to trailing slash  
>> version /news/2007/07/07/
>
> John, how important is this?  I think a former discussion on the list  
> mentioned that most search engines are ok with the trailing slash vs.  
> no trailing slash going to the same resource.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Rob
>
If you are consistent on your site, so you always use trailing slash or 
not, Google says it will handle things properly.

But what if you have great indexing on /news/, and people linking to you 
on /news/, but /news returns the same content? Now what if I link to 
/news from a high power web site. Will Google decide to "value" the 
/news over the /news/ version? Will it drop the "duplicate" at /news/ 
even though it has your backlinks?

Another consideration - what if half the world links to your /news/ and 
the other half to /news. Is your incoming "link juice" being split 
across the two unique URLs? Would you benefit more if the /news was a 
301 redirect to /news/ (where a 301 redirect is followed by Google, 
including the flow of link juice?)

I believe it is best to leave these matters up to the webmaster, not the 
webmaster's competitors nor the Google engineers.

--=john

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