Bingpreview/1.0b Useragent Using Adding Trailing Slash to all URLs
-
The Bingpreview crawler, which I think exists in order to take snapshots of mobile friendly pages, crawled my pages last night for the first time. However, it is adding a trailing slash to the end of each of my dynamic pages. The result is my program is giving the wrong page--my program is not expecting a trailing slash at the end of the urls. It was 160 pages, but I have thousands of pages it could do this to.
I could try doing a mod rewrite but that seems like it should be unnecessary. ALL the other crawlers are crawling the proper urls. None of my hyperlinks have the slash on the end. I have written to Bing to tell them of the problem.
Is anyone else having this issue? Any other suggestions for what to do?
The user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
-
Will do. Forgot to mention Bing is checking into it. But for the reasons you mentioned I am still going to do the 301s. Thanks again.
-
Sounds like a plan. I'd also make every redirect a 301, just in case. Cheers.
-
Thanks for your reply Cyrus. Wow, so much to learn.
I will put in logic via a mod redirect to basically remove the trailing slash and go to the resulting url because otherwise all the trailing slash urls will be a different page of basically a 'no-product' business and the like.
These are all dynamically generated pages, so I think as long as I resolve to the 'proper' no-slash version then I won't need to worry about anything else, like a rel=canonical tag because there wont be any identical content.
Does that sound right to you?
-
On one hand I'd agree with you that you shouldn't have to rewrite those URLs on your end. On the other hand, it's usually best practice to make sure both versions of a URL (with slash and/or without) resolve to the same page. The reason for this is that:
- Search bots, including Google, will often "explore" variations of URLs for discoverability reasons - they want to make sure they are discovering all of your available content.
- People will link to you with and without trailing slashes. If they link to you with a trailing slash and your page breaks, you could be wasting link equity, to say nothing of the bad user experience of people visiting your site from the referral links
- For one reason or another it's common to append URLs with various parameters (for tracking reasons, campaings, etc) and often these URLs are generated by third party services when pointing at your site.
For all of these reasons, it's pretty common to either force redirect trailing slashes (via a 301) or make sure both versions resolve to the same content, and use a rel=canonical tag to indicate to search engines that these are indeed meant to be the same page.
On the other hand, if this is something not feasible and URLs ending in a slash are indeed different pages, you might want to carefully consider what those pages deliver to both humans and bots because it seems inevitable that both will eventually crawl and stumble upon them.
Perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but I hope it helps.
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
-
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers Any markup that could be used to be listed like this. Why is some sites listed like this and some not. Why is the adzuna.co.za page listed with Results 1-10 while some other with Jobs 1-10 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | classifiedtech0 -
301 to trailing slash version then canonical
Hi Mozzers I'm just doing an audit for a client and see that all non-trailing-slash URLs are 301'd to trailing-slash URLS. So far so good. But then all the trailing-slash URLs are canonicalled back to the non-trailing-slash URLs. This feels wrong to me, but is it? Never come across this before. Should the canonicals just be removed? Any help much appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
URL Redirect: http://www.example.net/ vs. http://www.example.net
I currently have a website set up so that http://www.example.net/ redirects to http://www.example.net but **http://www.example.net/ **has more links and a higher page authority. Should I switch the redirect around? Here's the Open Site Explorer metrics for both: http://www.example.net/ Domain Authority: 38/100 Page Authority: 48/100 Linking Root Domains: 112 Total Links: 235 http://www.example.net Domain Authority: 38/100 Page Authority: 45/100 Linking Root Domains: 18 Total Links: 39
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbrake0 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Block all but one URL in a directory using robots.txt?
Is it possible to block all but one URL with robots.txt? for example domain.com/subfolder/example.html, if we block the /subfolder/ directory we want all URLs except for the exact match url domain.com/subfolder to be blocked.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0