Possible SEO threat

alexgeek · Oct 30th, 2007, 20:18

I'm not too sure about this, but I've protected against it anyway.
If a site were to link to "example.com///" the site should still show the homepage but with two more slashes in the URL.
If a competitor site was linking to example.com 5 time:

example.com//
example.com///
example.com////
example.com/////
example.com//////

A search engine may index all of these and therefor penalize example.com for duplicate content.
This can be countered with this htaccess redirect.

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/[/]+$ /$1 [R=301,L]

It redirect if there is more than one slash repeated.
which will match all of the URLs above.

Not really sure if this is a threat but I thought I'd share this

.

JacobHaug · Nov 1st, 2007, 12:37

I find that hard to believe, not sure though.

alexgeek · Nov 1st, 2007, 13:39

Go on http://www.w3schools.com////////
It's the same page, but there are more characters in the URL.
Plus I'd rather my pages look neater

JacobHaug · Nov 1st, 2007, 20:04

It seems to me....
http://www.w3schools.com/
and
http://www.w3schools.com////////

Look the same. Same with...

http://www.google.com/
and
http://www.google.com////////

Neither website is doing a redirect!

aso186 · Nov 6th, 2007, 14:48

I wish I could find the original source but I did read most SE's (*cough* Google) allow for the extra trailing slashes with no penalty

alexgeek · Nov 6th, 2007, 15:17

That's fair enough, but I think I prefer my URLs with one slash so I will leave it in for the sake of it