Google dropping urls because of an extra forward slash

[projectpilot]

Hi

I use the google webmaster tools and its quite useful. Here is my situation. A lot of my indexed pages are being dropped at the moment.
And I am not sure why. The pages are still there.

In the Google webmaster tools,

In the Diagnostic/Web crawl

I see this related to my url crawled.

Not found (62)

URL Detail Last Calculated
http://www.example.com/forums//thread61960.html 404 (Not
found) [?] Jan 17, 2007
http://www.example.com/forums//thread61986.html 404 (Not
found) [?] Jan 17, 2007
http://www.example.com/forums//thread62010.html 404 (Not
found) [?] Jan 17, 2007
http://www.example.com/forums//thread62021.html 404 (Not
found) [?] Jan 17, 2007

All these URL's have an extra "/" after the
"http://www.mysitedotcom/forums/" making it no reachable and
thus being dropped. The pages are all there and reachable if you take
away the extra "/". like this:
http://www.example.com/forums/thread61960.html

What is going wrong? What can I do to change this? What Can I do so
that google can still crawl it and my pages do not get dropped

[edited by: tedster at 10:32 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2007]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[AndyA]

Are you using Invisionboard?

In the Admin area, there is a place where you are asked to enter the URL of the board. They have already programmed this for a "/" so if you put one at the end of the URL when you enter it, you get double "//".

It could be this way on other forum software as well, and yes, I know this from experience...unfortunately.

[projectpilot]

NO I am using vbulletin for my forum software.

I do not think that is the problem. When you go to my site, you can browse through it and it doesnt show the "//" anywhere.

Its the google index that shows that. Am i being clear? When click on the google (not found) links, it shows the "//", so whn you click on it obviously that will give you a 404. What can I do. It looks like something is wrong somewhere. Nothing has changed in my server.

What can I do?

[tedster]

Others have also reported that googlebot sometimes asks for a "double slash" url. In some cases this creates a duplicate url problem, because the server does not return a 404. So you are half way there, just by returning a 404 for the bad urls. These urls should not be indexed, no matter how googlebot is getting them.

Are you sure that the correct urls are actually being dropped? I would normally expect Google to continue to spider and index the good versions of the urls, even as they work to throw away the bad, double-slash versions.

[projectpilot]

NO Correct URLs are not being dropped. The Double Slash ones are the ones that are showing up in the not found section. I was just wondering if they will drop the actual ones with a single slash. I checked they are fine.

I was alarmed because I thought what if they actually dropped the same page with a single slash. Looks like the same page with a single slash is still indexed. I dont know where google got the "//" in it.

Any more suggestions to what might have happened?

[gevorg]

Re: When you go to my site, you can browse through it and it doesnt show the "//" anywhere

I think IE fixes it automatically. So if you do not see it it does not mean it's not there.