URL Designing and Site Architecture

[adiez1234]

Hi,

1. At the end of the URL, should we have "/" or not (for e.g. my website www.example.com/abc/)

2. What is the optimum level of site depth

3. Google crawler will go through the breadcrumb or url (If a page is at 6th level through breadcrumb and at 4th level through URL, at which level will google crawler recognize this.

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Aditya,

1. That is personal preference. Search engines used to associate paths ending in / as a directory and paths not ending in / a file. Here is a great article on the subject from Google Webmaster Tools Blog.

2. I would say optimum is 3 to 4, but depending on the size of your site, you could probably go up to 6 without too much of a problem.

3. URL.

Hope this helps,

Mike

[CleverPhD]

I would second Mike's points.  The ending in a slash also helps out in systems like Google Analytics.  GA uses the ending slash to organize traffic reports for one section of a site versus the other.  You want to make sure that you set this up so that GA puts the right pages in the right directories for aggregate traffic reports.

My preference is to use the ending slash - most people think of the ending slash as a folder with pages that are sitting inside it (even though many modern CMS make this moot) and so various types of reporting software will often reflect that.

That said, I currently run a site that does not use the trailing slash and as so it can "work" as long as you know the ins and outs of things.

The key is to be consistent in your use of a slash or not.   Often, it is in your own template or content where you are either forgetting to put a slash in (or leave out).  I would also recommend 301 redirects in place so that if you do not have a trailing slash in a url where there should be one (or vice versa) it will 301 to the proper url.  You can then run a spider on your site and see if there are any 301s that pop up to show any issues with the missing slashes etc.

Cheers!