Yahoo insists on dropping trailing slash

[Patrick Taylor]

One of my sites gets almost nil referrals from Yahoo. I have noticed slurp visits the homepage www.domain.com/ on a daily basis but otherwise just occasionally looks for pages such as /page despite the fact that all links point to /page/ as being the correct URL (it just so happens that omitting the trailing slash also displays the page).

When I search Yahoo for an existing page such as www.domain.com/page/ they have actually indexed www.domain.com/page - so it appears that as far as Yahoo is concerned, the site has no internal links and probably explains why there are no referrals.

Suggestions on the cause, and solutions would be appreciated.

[BillyS]

I have the same problem. Despite the fact the trailing slash is always present in links pointing to a page, Yahoo insists on looking for the page without the slash.

I return a 301 and point Slurp to the correct page (with a slash), but this happens constantly.

[Rollo]

This is a widespread problem, the only way I've been able to solve it is with permanent site wide rediects from wwww.xyz.com/page/ to wwww.xyz.com/page

This seems to work fine with no side effects.

[Patrick Taylor]

MSN seems to be doing the same. I've also introduced site-wide 301 redirects from domain.com/page/ to domain.com/page - though I'm not sure what effect on crawling and ranking in Yahoo is caused by the dropped trailing slash being requested (for pages that do have the trailing slash). I have certainly not seen much crawling by slurp, and it was only ever requesting the slashless versions. MSN was requesting the slashed versions.