Trailing Slashes on Home Pages
-
I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed...
I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/
The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com
Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without.
I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.
-
Totally agree, it's kind of a non issue, improve the canonical if you can but really, don't sweat it.
-
Oh yes, thanks for that. I've read that page a few times. :S
Apologies for the confusion Alex.
Don't have a crisis of confidence anyway! If there's a canonical 99 times out of 100 (probably more) I'm sure Google would get this right whether it's the homepage or not.
What server is the site hosted on Alex? Or are the URLs controlled by a CMS?
-
That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.
This pretty much details it in full:
-
Hi Alex
Ah, crisis of confidence again!
I didn't think that this was the case though for the index page. I thought normalisation meant they were treated as the same page. As Marcus said, I can't 301 the example.com page to example.com/ .
-
Hey,
in an ideal world, make sure it is has no trailing slash. But, as per the Google specific recommendations, make sure both resolve as a 200 OK rather than redirecting / to non /.
Think about it -
The browser removes the trailing slash. Also, go to any big site, Google, SEOMoz - the all have no slash. But.. check it in webbug and they resolve on both.
For me, having a trailing slash on the root or anywhere is just something else for folks to forget to add if they are linking or some such.
Here I would just remove the trailing slash in your canonical if you can just to be sure but the usual rules don't apply on the homepage and www.example.com & www.example.com/ are regarded as the same thing.
I have constant crisis of confidence - i often wonder if I am making it up as I go along or somewhere down the history of all the hundreds of SEO audits I have done I actually learned something along the way! I have actually googled something that I was unsure about and found my own blog post about it before. I think, much like Homer Simpson, every new thing I learn now pushes out an older thing!
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus
I agree out outside of the home page it's an issue (& good answer btw) but it's only the index page I'm worried about.
It's that crisis of confidence that I'm sure we all get from time to time as to whether something rather simple/fundamental is actually as we believe it to be.
I've been re-reading this document http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 and I think it's section 3.2.6 (if I remember right) that covers normalization of the root URL's.
-
The two versions you speak of are treated as duplicate content. Ideally you should make sure the URL is the same everywhere, and 301 redirect to your preferred version. Are you sure the browser itself isn't removing the trailing slash? I know Chrome does on non-directory pages.
Saying that, if you have a canonical tag it shouldn't cause a massive problem, but it will help to do everything properly. Do everything you can to make sure all links under your control are the same version.
-
Hey Alex
There is a good overview of this here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Outside of the homepage, a slash url and a non slash URL are regarded as two seperate pages so are technically duplicates. Now, Google will generally deal with this but it is not optimal (which is what we are all about eh) so you should make a call and either go / or no / and then 301 the other version to the default.
The homepage should resolve on both and 200 for both and not redirect to the non slash. The browser will generally remove the slash on a root URL.
This is from the above link:
Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.
If you are using a CMS there are usually plugins or configuration options to enforce a slash if that is your preferred option.
The big deal here is to
A - be consistent
B - 301 the alternative to the preferred for crawl optimisation and to ensure no daft duplication issues crop up.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
Linking Pages - 404s
Hello, I have noticed that we have recently managed to accrue a large number of 404s that are listed as Page Title/URL of Linking Page in Moz (e.g. http://www.onexamination.com/international/) but I do not know which site they are coming from, is there an easy why to find out or shall we just create redirects for them all? Thanks in advance for your help. Rose
Technical SEO | | bmjcai1 -
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be? The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us. Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Auto generated pages
Hi, I have two sites showing (crawl report from SEOMoz.org) extremely high numbers of duplicate titles and descriptions (e.g., 33,000). These sites have CMSs behind them and so the duplicate titles, etc., are a result of auto-generated pages. What is the best way to address these problems? Thanks! David
Technical SEO | | DWill0 -
Unreachable Pages
Hi All Is there a tool to check a website if it has stand alone unreachable pages? Thanks for helping
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Different links to to the same page
Hi, Based on the user's actions we post activity into users Facebook timeline. And each activity has link back to our particular page on our website. For example if original page was: www.Domain.com from Facebook timeline it would be like this: www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 Do you think this will have a negative effect on our page rankings as we will eded up having a lot of different URL's to the same page? www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=456788765609 etc.. Thank you, Karen Bdoyan
Technical SEO | | showme0