Google’s Gary Illyes answered the question in an office hours hangout about whether a double slash in a URL has an impact on a website’s SEO.
A double slash occurs for a number of reasons that are often related to a coding issue in the CMS or .htaccess file that can result in duplicate web pages that differ only in the URL.
It’s a problematic issue that generally can’t be solved by creating a .htaccess rule to rewrite the URL to remove the extra slash because that doesn’t really solve the real problem.
The only way to really solve the double slash in URL problem is to track down exactly what is causing the web server to generate double slashes in URLs.
This is the question that was asked:
“What is the SEO impact of using double slashes in a URL, such as a
Gary Illyes replied:
From a Puritan perspective, this is not a problem. if you look RFC 3986, Section 3the forward slash is a separator and is fine to appear in the URL path as many times as you like, even repeatedly.
From a usability perspective, it’s probably not the best idea, and it might also confuse some trackers.”
Tracker usability and confusion
The usability of a website is important because this can lead to user dissatisfaction and frustration, which can have a long-term negative effect on the popularity of the website, which in turn could have an indirect impact on visibility if no one recommends the site, people stop visiting the site, and websites hesitate to link to it because of the poor usability.
Crawler confusion can be considered to contribute to a direct impact on SEO. It’s good practice to make a site easy to crawl and understand, so anything confusing to the crawler should be dealt with immediately.
Google can probably figure it out, but expecting Google to figure out how to crawl a site is not a best practice.
Have an htaccess expert take a look at your rules to see if this is the cause of the problem. Or, have a developer look at the code to see if there’s anything causing the double slashes. Crawling with Screaming Frog can help identify where the double slash starts which in turn can provide a clue as to what is causing this technical issue.
Watch the Google Office Hours Hangout at minute 5:46 of the video:
Featured image by Shutterstock/Sklo Studio
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