I learned recently that Yahoo removes trailing slashes from URLs. Someone with the alias Yahoo Mike on one of the search engine forums posted an explanation for this behavior.
"Just a quick note on trailing slashes… When users enter specific URLs, they don't always use trailing slashes. We normalize URLs to remove trailing slashes in order to align with what users are most likely to enter."
While there's no way to know for sure if Yahoo Mike is really an employee of Yahoo, it seems like as good an explanation as any. The problem with Yahoo deciding what's best is that the Every Day with Rachael Ray site I've been working on has trailing slashes for just about every URL which results in broken links in Yahoo's search results.
Fortunately, there's a fix being deployed, but it still seems silly to me that Yahoo would remove a slash from a URL because of some perceived user behavior. I'm glad someone noticed and pointed out what Yahoo is doing because it'd probably be weeks or months before I actually clicked on a link and found out myself.
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