Comments on: WordPress Anti-Pattern: Don’t Remove Trailing Slashes in URLs

By: Poe

Poe — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:54:36 +0000

cool, thanks the info.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:33:31 +0000

@Poe: The problem is that WP constructs an invalid trackback URL, so your trackbacks get silently dropped on the floor. I don't particularly care for the trailing slash either, but it seems like you have to decide between that and having trackbacks. (I'm not part of the WP development team; I'm just reporting what I've found from my own experience.)

By: Poe Jea

Poe Jea — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:34:52 +0000

What exactly is the problem? The lack of the last slash makes it appear as if the site was linked to too many times? (i.e. a user on some other site clicked on the link like 10 times?

What do we do if we MUST have the link with no slash at the end? I really hate the slash and want it off so it will look better.

Thanks!

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:54:23 +0000

Understood, but you’ve actually hit on the key misconception I had. I never thought of the individual post page as a directory. And there’s precedent for that: Look at the screen shots I posted above, specifically the “Numeric” version. There’s no trailing slash in “/archives/123″.

By “unusual burst of inbound links,” I meant actual, valid inbound links from other sites, as indicated by the Google Blog Search in the Dashboard. So there really are pingbacks that are missing because I had a faulty URL scheme.

By: Claude

Claude — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:34:19 +0000

It's a bad idea to leave out a trailing slash for directories because it forces a redirect (HTTP status code 301), which adds a delay to the user's experience. This could be what you identified as "an unusual burst of inbound links." See Avoid Redirects here.