To include / at the end of a URL or not
-
Hi
I have recently noticed my site works with / and the end of a URL and without. I wanted to know if there is any SEO impact on this? Will it be seen as 2 different pages? if so what is the best option to go for www.mydomain.com/page/ or www.mydomain.com/page
Thanks
E
-
Hey E,
Yes, Google considered these two URLs separately. Usually the "/" indicates that, it is a directory and the URL without "/" denotes a file. It's better to put a 301 redirect to the appropriate page to avoid any problem.
Checkout what Google recommends on this topic:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.htmlHope this helps!
Umar
-
My view is that it makes no difference as long as you're consistent about it. My personal preference is to include the / at the end - I like to think of it as a sort of "full stop" to the URL
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
-
Home Page Being Indexed / Referral URLs /
I have a few questions related to home page URLs being indexed, canonicalization, and GA reporting... 1. I can view the home page by typing in domain.com , domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm There are no redirects and it's canonicalized to point to domain.com/index.htm -- how important is it to have redirects? I don't want unnecessary redirects or canonical tags, but I noticed the trailing slash can sometimes be typed in manually on other pages, sometimes not. 2. When I do a site search (site:domain.com), sometimes the HP shows up as "domain.com/", never "domain.com/index.htm" or "domain.com", and sometimes the HP doesn't show up period. This seems to change several times a day, sometimes within 15 minutes. I have no idea what is causing it and I don't know if it has anything to do with #1. In a perfect world, I would ask for the /index.htm to be dropped and redirected to .com/, and the canonical to point to .com/ 3. I've noticed in GA I see / , /index.htm, and a weird Google referral URL (/index.htm?referrer=https://www.google.com/) all showing up as top pages. I think the / and /index.htm is because I haven't setup a default URL in GA, but I'm not sure what would cause the referrer. I tracked back when the referrer URL started to show up in the top pages, and it was right around the time they moved over to https://, so I'm not sure what the best option is to remove that. I know this is a lot - I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | DigMS0 -
Need URL structure suggestions
On my website I am in the process of creating expat city guides for different cities in Cambodia. I've already gotten three up, but I am worried that my URL structure is not the best, so I am wondering if I should fix it before I put the rest up. Right now the city guides are housed here: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/ There's a section for each city, this one is for Battambang: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang And then there are sections for hotels, restaurants, etc. movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation So once you finally get to a review for an individual hotel or activity, the URL is really long, like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation/classy-hotel Should I just par the section names down so the URL would be something like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ ? I was hoping by having the long URLs slugs for my section pages, such as "battambang-hotels-and-accommodation" they would be more likely to show on search terms like "Battambang hotels" than if the section was just "accommodation." However, this whole section is getting much less search traffic than anything else on my site, so I am wondering if it is because of these ridiculously long URLs. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Lina5000 -
Question about collapsible/Expandable
I will premise this question by saying I am not a developer, so please forgive my ignorance on this one. Is there a way to achieve an expandable/collapsible without relying on javascript? Thanks all! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
301 Redirect / cross-domain canonical to a URL w/ Ampersand
I have a question regarding ampersands, we are needing to redirect to a URL w/ an ampersand in the URL: http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-&-Associates-Insurance-Agency Will Google pass page authority/juice despite the fact that there is an ampersand in the URL, if we were to 301 redirect or cross-domain canonical to the url? Should we 301 redirect to http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-%26-Associates-Insurance-Agency instead of http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-&-Associates-Insurance-Agency? I don't have the option of removing the ampersand Thank you for your time!
Technical SEO | | Gatelist0 -
/out/ URLs in GWMTs
I am recently seeing some URLs come up as 404s in GWMTs for a client. They look like this: http://client-url/out/www.linkedin.com/company/client-linkedin-name /out/client-url/sub-directory/postname/ We thought they might have something to do with the social plugins but they are all over the place and they are sometime for internal pages on the site. Anyone run into these and know why they are happening?
Technical SEO | | DragonSearch0 -
Penalization for Duplicate URLs with %29 or "/"
Hi there - Some of our dynamically generated product URLs somehow are showing up in SEOmoz as two different URLs even though they are the same page- one with a %28 and one with a 🙂 e.g., http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ Also, some of the URLs are duplicated with a "/" at the end of them. Does Google penalize us for these duplicate URLs? Should we add canonical tags to all of them? Finally, our development team is claiming that they are not generating these pages, and that they are being generated from facebook/pinterest/etc. which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is that right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90