Thanks very much! Appreciate your thought and insight.

Thanks very much for the detailed reply. This sort of makes me sound like a dick... but I should probably mention I have a good amount of SEO experience, and understand how pagerank flows through a site hierarchy. I've done SEO at 400k+ URL sites before. The thing is, the last time SEO was my full-time job was 2012—and a whole lot has changed since then.

I'm not interested in changing the URL scheme because I think it will benefit our SEO. I think our rankings will probably suffer slightly (just by virtue of the fact we're making ANY changes), and I'm ok with a small hit. The way I see it, the existing structure is unnecessary and a little clunky, so why not trim it sooner rather than later?

Clickhole is a great example of a URL structure the same as the site I'm currently working on.

http://www.clickhole.com/article/5-explorers-who-saw-americas-columbus-turned-back--5356#1,
http://www.clickhole.com/theysaidwhat/find-out-what-rihanna-bear-grylls-and-jane-goodall-5368
http://www.clickhole.com/quiz/we-can-determine-which-state-youre-just-way-you-an-1908

Each of these URLs has a subdirectory... and each subdirectory leads to a 404. The archive views are located at different URLs:

http://www.clickhole.com/features/news/
http://www.clickhole.com/features/they-said-what/
http://www.clickhole.com/features/quizzes/

The user experience of Clickhole is just fine (there are no links to the plain subdirs, so a user could only end up there if they typed the address is) and I'm sure there's no SEO loss-Clickhole isn't trying to rank for "article," "theysaidwhat," or "quiz."

The thing is, those original URLs are a little cluttered. I'd just as soon make them

http://www.clickhole.com/5-explorers-who-saw-americas-columbus-turned-back--5356#1,
http://www.clickhole.com/find-out-what-rihanna-bear-grylls-and-jane-goodall-5368
http://www.clickhole.com/we-can-determine-which-state-youre-just-way-you-an-1908

Is there anything aside from UI (or conflicts with duplicate URL text) I'm missing?

Thanks for the reply! I can see your way of thinking, but the concept of navigating by directory seems to be a very dated way of thinking.

I don't intend to have, say "publisher.com/food/" landing pages—the navigation menu will point users to any appropriate archive views. On a site that did have those landing pages live, I can see that a few users might want to find their way around via subdirectory. But I think virtually all web users navigate by click, not by URL, especially on mobile.

There will be a central "feed" that links to all content, and this feed will be paginated back to the beginning of all posts. I believe this is sufficient for Googlebot, no? Setting aside any UI / nav issues, is there a structural reason to keep subdirs in a URL?

Thanks so much, ATP! It looks like writing the condition into .htaccess does the trick—at least for my local install. Is this because the commands located within the

BEGIN WordPress

END WordPress

comments only apply to URLs outside of the WP admin area?

Thanks again, ATP—that was a very thorough and helpful response!

Thanks for the replies, Donna, Martijn. I am running Yoast and considered adding the trailing slash, but:

-Most of the inbound links we have are to URLs with no slash

-The slash style seems a little dated in general-few sites use them these days.

I'd really love to just figure out how to solve the issue a little closer to the root.

I've searched around quite a bit for a solution here, but I can't find anything. I apologize if this is too technical for the forum.

I have a Wordpress site hosted on Nginx by WP Engine. Currently it resolves requests to URLs either with or without a trailing slash.

So, both of these URLs are functional:

<code>mysite.com/single-post</code>

and

<code>mysite.com/single-post/</code>

I would like to remove the trailing slash from all posts, forcing mysite.com/single-post/ to redirect to mysite.com/single-post. I created a redirect rule on the server:

^/(.*)/$ -> /$1

and this worked well for end-users, but rendered the admin panel inaccessible. Somewhere, Wordpress is adding a trailing slash back on to the URL mysite.com/wp-admin, resulting in a redirect loop. I can't see anything obvious in .htaccess.

Where is this rule adding a trailing slash to 'wp-admin' established?

Thanks very much

Thanks for the reply! I can see your way of thinking, but the concept of navigating by directory seems to be a very dated way of thinking.

I don't intend to have, say "publisher.com/food/" landing pages—the navigation menu will point users to any appropriate archive views. On a site that did have those landing pages live, I can see that a few users might want to find their way around via subdirectory. But I think virtually all web users navigate by click, not by URL, especially on mobile.

There will be a central "feed" that links to all content, and this feed will be paginated back to the beginning of all posts. I believe this is sufficient for Googlebot, no? Setting aside any UI / nav issues, is there a structural reason to keep subdirs in a URL?