All entries for Tuesday 20 November 2007

An Extra Forward Slash foils the Googlebot

Writing about web page http://www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk

LR Products have migrated from solely serving the automotive and truck cabs business to mainly serving the building trade and renovators with GRP Chimneys, brick effect cladding, stone and brick effect arches window canopies, dormers etc. Moving from the mass identical to individually colour matched products they have rebranded to GRP Building Products.

Their web hosts redirected their old domain www.lrproducts.co.uk to the new domain www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk but unfortunately added two forward slashes after the .co.uk. So these linked to www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk// (note Blogbuilder fixes the problem!)
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk//products.html
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk//finishes.html
When you click on these most browsers take you to the correct page just like the real links below:
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk/
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk/products.html
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk/finishes.html
I suspected that this was not helping the Search Bots and found confirmation here from Webmaster World: Google dropping urls because of an extra forward slash

GRP Building Products Ltd’s hosting company are removing the extra slash. Good adherance to standards will always help the search bots. Yes these could get around the problem but all the extra parsing and code that they add increases their already considerable carbon footprint. Simple, fast, easy to navigate sites are also greener.

Robert McGonigle : 20 Nov 2007 10:54 |  Tags: Carbon Footprint Googlebot Search Search Engines |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem