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?
-
It makes perfect sense, thank you!
-
Okay, not to make everything more complicated, but it's generally best practice to force rewrite everything to lower-case. Technically, uppercase and lowercase URLs are different addresses, which gives way to duplicate content issues. That said, in the real world I've rarely seen this make much of an impact - it's more a case of crossing your T's and dotting your i's.
As an easier alternative to redirects and forcing lowercase, it might be easier to implement rel=canonical tags on all of these pages. This would tell search engines which version of the URL was "correct" and not worry about the others.
So all of these URLs:
www.example.com/folder/US
www.example.com/folder/US/
www.example.com/folder/us
www.example.com/folder/us/... would have the same canonical tag in the
Make sense? Hope I'm not adding additional confusion to the situation.
-
Thank you so much for the great response. I figured out why it is redirecting but now I'm even more confused.
The URL www.example.com redirects to www.example.com/folder/US. The URL www.example.com/folder/us (lowercase letters) redirects to the version with the trailing slash - www.example.com/folder/us/.
So apparently in OSE I typed in the lowercase version. Either way, they have a lot of different versions out there.
-
Hi Kellibean,
So technically, a folder with a trailing slash is different from one without. Although in reality search engines will hardly ever ding you for this, it's best practice to have one version redirect to the other.
For example, if you try to access http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ (with the trailing slash) it will drop the slash through a 301 redirect. This practice dates back to the old days of SEO when search engines weren't as sophisticated, and these 2 urls could be misinterpreted as duplicate content. Even though it is not as big of a problem today, it's still best practice (and I recommend) to do so.
OSE operates under these strict rules, so when it says "No Data Available" that means it has no link data available for that exact URL, even if it has data for it's trailing slash sister.
That said, without knowing the URL, it's hard to say why OSE detects a redirect. Sometimes what's visible in your browser doesn't match the server header information. I'd do a crawl of your site with Screamng Frog (free version) and check all your server headers, or use the MozBar to do it one at a time.
If you have a question about a particular URL and how it interacts with any SEOmoz tool, feel free to contact the Help Team (help@seomoz.org) and they can look into the issue for free.
Best of luck.
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
-
Country and Language tags-Running an SEO audit on a site that definitely has more than one language, but nothing is pulling up. I don't quite understand href lang or how to go about it. HELP HELP!
Ran an SEO audit and I don't really understand country and language tags. For example, sony.com definitely has more than one language, but how do I seo check href lang ? Do I inspect the page? etc?
Technical SEO | | Mindgruver0 -
Conversion of URL's for Readability
Reading over Rands latest Post about URL structure I had a quick question about the best way to convert URL's that don't have perfect URL structure... Current the Structure of our E-commerce store has a structure that is not friendly with domain.com/product/zdcd-jobd3d-fdoh what is the easiest way to convert these to read URL's without causing any disruptions with the SERP. Are we talking about a MOD-Rewrite in the CMS.......
Technical SEO | | CMcMullen0 -
WMT - Googlebot can't access your site
Hi On our new website which is just a few weeks old upon logging into Webmaster tools I am getting the following message Googlebot can't access your site - The overall error rate for DNS queries is 50% What do I need to do to resolve this, I have never had this problem before with any of the sites - where the domains are with Fasthosts (UK) and hosting is with Dreamhosts. What is the recommended course of action Google mention contacting your host in my case Dreamhost - but what do you need to ask them in a support ticket. When doing a fetch in WMT the fetch status is a success?
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
Trailing Slash Problems
Link juice being split between trailing slash and non versions. ie. ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk and ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/ Initially asked in here and was told to do a rewrite in the htaccess file. I don't have access to this with squarespace, nor can I add canonical tags on a page by page basis. 301 redirect from scentsy-uk to scentsy-uk/ didn't work either...said that the redirect wasn't completing in an error message on the browser. Squarespace hasn't been very helpful at all. My question is....is there another way to fix this? or should I just call it a day with squarespace and move to wordpress?
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Duplicate Content For Trailing Slashes?
I have several website in campaigns and I consistently get flagged for duplicate content and duplicate page titles from the domain and the domain/ versions of the sites even though they are properly redirected. How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
301 redirects and OSE
We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links. I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE. Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site. I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit. What am I missing? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0 -
Are URL's with trailing slash seen as two different URLs
Hello, http://www.example.com and http://ww.example.com/ Are these seen as two different URL's ? Just as with www or non www ? Or it doesn't make any difference ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050