How Does A Correct URL Look Like?

I wish to touch on this topic because I realised the google crawler returns a lot of 404 errors when it attempted to read my url without a slash at the back when it is actually needed!

What does this mean? It means your site is less searchable by many people! Many webpages on your site will not be found and hence they are NOT INDEXED!

A correct url for a file is:

http://www.charleslau.com/myfile

A correct url for a directory is:

http://www.charleslau.com/mydirectory/

Notice an additional slash at the back? That slash is very important! Unfortunately, many people forgot to add in a slash after typing the url for a directory, and don’t key that… In fact, many commercials actually didn’t!

Of course, in many cases that erroneous url also works… All the server needs to do is to be a little smart, and ask the visitor to do a redirect to the correct url. The visitor’s browser will automatically ask for the correct url later…

But just imagine whenever a client keys in that erroneous url and has a url redirect to the correct url each time… If your site is churning 10,000 requests each day, it turns out to be 20,000… An extra 10,000 requests for your error to be corrected… And if you have done a very big campaign and have expected a huge traffic for your site, get prepared for a “double espresso” for your error… And your traffic will use up even more bandwidth for nothing which would later incur costs on your site for huge Internet access! I wouldn’t mind paying for more access on my server, but probably not this way of paying… it’s such a waste… Furthermore, your server will also need extra processing power to handle that extra load… Good luck!