Impact of double slashes in URLs on SEO: Analysis and recommendations

Google web expert Gary Illies looks at the impact of double slashes in URLs on SEO in the context of the Office Hours hangout. A double slash in a URL can appear for a variety of reasons, often related to coding problems on the CMS or in the .htaccess file, which can lead to duplicate web pages that differ only in the URL.

“What is the SEO impact of using double slashes in a URL, such as in https://www.example.us//us/shop?”

To this question, Gary Illies replied that from a purely puritanical point of view it was not a problem. Looking at section 3 of RFC 3986, the slash is a delimiter and can appear in the URL path as many times as you like, even repeatedly. But from a usability point of view, this might not be the best idea, and it might confuse some scanners.

🚀Site enforcement is important as it can lead to user dissatisfaction and frustration, which can have a negative impact on the site's popularity in the long run. This, in turn, can indirectly affect visibility if no one recommends the site, people stop visiting the site, and websites are reluctant to link to the site due to poor usability.

• 📌 Crawler confusion can be considered a direct impact on SEO. This is to make the site easy to scan and understand, so any issue that confuses the crawler should be resolved immediately.