Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
-
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages.
SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website.
SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link.
WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is.
THINGS I"VE TRIED:
(1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page.
(2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag.
(3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file.
(4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file.
(5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]Please help friends.
-
Having a canonical link pointing to that same url as in the address bar has no affect as far as search engines are concern, the reason moz.com gives for doing this is that if some one scrapes your site, the canonical will point back to the original.
The whole idea of canonical tags and 301's is to do with requests, you want the all requests showing the same content to appear the same page to the search engine.
With normal pages a slash means a different request that without, and to fix it you need to create a 301 that requests again to the correct url. in the process you have lost a bit of link juice.
but when requesting the home page with or without the "/", the request is the same. there is no need to fix it.
press F12 in your browser and test it yourself using the network tab, you can see that entering the url with or without the "/" on the homepage results in the same request.
-
Thank you for your response Alan.
If what you say is true why wouldn't google webmaster tools specifically say that in their article on Canonical links? and why would high pr sites like moz.com feel the need to specify the correct link with a canonical link on their homepage. Just because the browsers read the homepage as the same does not suggest to me that it does not matter if one specifies which is the correct one. The question at hand is not whether it can be read but whether it can be back-linked to properly.
-
If you have a trailing slash, on a url like domain.com/mypage/ then that is a different url to domain.com/mypage
If you fix this with a 301 you lose a bit of link juice in the redirect.
but if you are talking about a homepage url such as domain.com and domain.com/ these are not treated as different urls, there is no redirect between them. there is no problem here, don't worry about it
-
Philip,
You are the man. That totally worked.
I do believe that google is smart enough to see them as the same, I also think it would make sense that they are trying to weed out most people that don't know what they are doing by giving priority rank to websites that backlinks that are consistent with their canonical specification. They say in their support articles that they see the trailing slash and no trailing slash sites as 2 separate sites and that webmasters will be spreading their link juice if they don't specify which one to use. It seems to logically follow that if your web users are linking to the "wrong" page, google is not going to give priority because it signifies that the developer is not properly branding his site and/or hasn't created the user experience to cause it to happen properly. Here are 2 sources where google talks about their stance on canonical links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375 . I'd like to hear any more thoughts on my hypothesis.
-
Dillon,
Thanks for the additional explanation. I do see the canonical tag in your code and see that it is being placed by Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin.
Honestly, you should not worry about the trailing slash. Google and Bing are intelligent enough to understand that .com and .com/ are the same website. You are receiving credit for your backlinks regardless of whether or not the trailing slash exists on the link.
Having said that, here's how you can remove the trailing slash if you still really want to.....
Login to your WordPress backend as an administrator and look for "Plugins" on the left menu and go to "Editor" within the plugins menu. From there, find the dropdown menu near the top right and go to "WordPress SEO". On the list of files that display on the right side, find "wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php".
In that file, use CTRL + F to find this line of code: $canonical = home_url( '/' );
Remove the / within the ' '
Click on "Update File". Refresh your homepage and you will see that the trailing slash is gone from the canonical tag. Keep in mind, this is a hack. When you update WordPress SEO, this will most likely be overwritten and you'll have to do it again.
-
Hi Philip,
Thank you for your response. I am definitely obsessing, although I'm pretty sure it is not over nothing, and, I would be happy to be proven wrong (it would save me some time) lol.
It is my understanding that a lot of browsers, like Chrome, will remove the slash from their url but just in the graphical user interface because it looks better, while in fact they reading it with the trailing slash at the end. Browser SEAMONKEY does accurately show the trailing slash. The real way to know from the coding is that the page source still shows <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.threewaystoharems.com/" /> , when I really want it to show as <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.threewaystoharems.com" /> (trailing slash omitted). If I were to speculate on what is really going on behind the scenes, is that google knows that most websites are going to default to using a trailing slash and most users are going to link without the trailing slash. It seems to me that google is trying to separate the SEO professionals from the amateurs by seeing these as two different sites and making the professionals have to figure out how to get the trailing slash off of their home pages in order to get their backlinks. If you notice, moz.com 's page source shows no trailing slash on their link rel="canonical" .
Am I crazy? I'm pretty sure I need to figure this out to get my backlinks to link properly.
-
Where are you seeing the trailing slash? If I go to threewaystoharems.com in my browser, there is no trailing slash. I do see a trailing slash if I do a Google search for "site:threewaystoharems.com" but that is normal. Every website will show that trailing slash.
I think you might be obsessing over a non-issue
Let me know if i am misunderstanding.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
After Server Migration - Crawling Gets slow and Dynamic Pages wherein Content changes are not getting Updated
Hello, I have just performed doing server migration 2 days back All's well with traffic moved to new servers But somehow - it seems that w.r.t previous host that on submitting a new article - it was getting indexed in minutes. Now even after submitting page for indexing - its taking bit of time in coming to Search Engines and some pages wherein content is daily updated - despite submitting for indexing - changes are not getting reflected Site name is - http://www.mycarhelpline.com Have checked in robots, meta tags, url structure - all remains well intact. No unknown errors reports through Google webmaster Could someone advise - is it normal - due to name server and ip address change and expect to correct it automatically or am i missing something Kindly advise in . Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve0 -
SEO strategy for conversion-optimised home page
I'm working on a very conventional-type site with a home page (why come to us), methods we use, pricing, reviews, FAQs and contact us. After reading the Moz case study at (http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/), I have been working on a conversion-optimised home page that consolidates much of content in all these pages. At the bottom of the home page, I then plan to add a list of blog posts "Want to read more? We have a lot of useful information on our blog. Here are the most popular articles:" with articles that explain more about the methods we use for example (content that was formerly on our methods page). Obviously this new blog will also have more interesting information (but a lot that could actually be converted into pages) This radically changes the site into just a home page full of selling points and calls-to-action and a blog. I have some questions about this strategy: How do we keep our search engine ranking for keywords such as "[our service] prices" or "[a particular method] London". We rank quite well on Google for these and it goes straight to the relevant page. Shall we keep the pages active somewhere even though the information is also on the home page? Is a blog actually necessary here (SEO wise)? The things I'm planning to write could easily be made into more pages. Am I going about this completely wrong by trying using the CRO guide? Should this sort of page be reserved for landing pages? The reason why I'm considering making a conversion-generating home page is because we only sell one service pretty much (although there are differences in how we do it on children vs. adults) and because we are quite niche so most of our traffic comes from organic sources. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LondonAli0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0