PR and Trailing Slashes

For all the original information I have on The Weirding, I'd expect a better Google PR. However, the low PR score hasn't changed in years and I think I've finally figured out why. It appears search engines see trailing slashes for directory URLs as separate from those without them. That means "www.theweirding.net" is not the same thing as "www.theweirding.net/" even though they lead to the same index page.

Not only is this stupid, it also shouldn't be the webmasters' problem; simply put, the search engines themselves should fix this little issue. But why would they, when it can be put-off on the thousands of us who run websites instead. Just think: Every one of us has to go through our entire sites, .HTACCESS files, and every referring link we have and change every one of them, when the search engines merely need to update their own techniques in probably one or a handful of places. But this would cost them time and money, so why wouldn't they place this burden on everyone else instead?

Yeah, not a fan of how search engines "work."

Anyway, I'll definitely get to fixing some of the messier pages, as I mentioned in the previous post, but this is a very large project which will take weeks, if not months, to even begin to unravel and I plan on starting it this weekend. I'll probably multitask and do a little of each as I go along, but because that can get confusing very quickly, I wanted to mention it in case you were waiting for this page or that one to get cleared-up.

Don't expect much new content for a minute. I already have so much that I can barely find my way around it all and cases such as this are why I've kept it as simple as possible up to now. I already know better than to suggest a deadline and you know better than to hold me to any kind of ETA, but I figure I'll be far enough ahead to consider some new content within a month or so.

© C Harris Lynn, 2011