Double Slashes

Google seeks mal-formed URLs

[rainborick]

I'm running into a problem with Google seeking URLs starting with a double slash, as in "//dir/somepage.htm". I spotted one earlier thread here [webmasterworld.com] where someone reported the same problem. I've scoured my site and, while I do a lot of relative addressing, I can't find the bad link. I caught reference online that this has been seen before, but I haven't been able to find any definitive causes or solutions. I set up a redirect with .htaccess, but I'm not happy about it. Any help would be appreciated.

[whatley]

I have found the same problems with one of my sites, and you can actually add as many /////////'s as you link and the pages still work! What I have done to combate this is to add all link as full URL's so linking to [widgets.com...] rather than ../14mm.htm

Will let you know if it helps.

[Patrick Taylor]

I've seen this too, but I doubt if it's a problem. It may be rather like adding # to a page address, in that Google doesn't see it as a different URL. In the instances I've seen it makes no difference to the PR of the page, even with several slashes introduced.

[DumpedbyG]

Hi rainborick

Do you have this problem with the normal googlebot or is it perhaps the new bot(v2, which is still a test phase).

I had the same thing but then I checked my logs it was a different bot than normal.

[tantalus]

I discovered this with site of mine doing a "site:" search about four weeks ago. So whether it was the normal bot or V2 the // urls were getting into the index.

Google spidereing these urls coincided with a 20% drop in my trafic which I at the time attributed to algo changes. Coincidence? I dunno.

I put in a base href to stop the rot when I dicovered the problem.

I now just checked again with the "site: search" and, lo and behold, the /// urls are no where to be seen.

So the good news might be that Google has fixed the problem?!?