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.
Missing trailing slash in URL on subpages resulting in Moz PA of 1
-
Even here in moz community I am noticing it. Is it really a factor to have an ending slash on the page? Does it make a difference? Our website has a homepage PA of 63, DA of 56 but all of our sub-pages are just 1 and they have been up for 4 months.
-
The redirect checker website is excellent. Great find!
-
Hope this helps,
Please see: https://github.com/blueprintmrk/htaccess
&
https://github.com/blueprintmrk/htaccess#redirect-using-redirectmatch
Removing "/." from .PHP URLs "win-win"
Alias “Clean” URLs
This snippet lets you use “clean” URLs -- those without a PHP extension, e.g.
example.com/users
instead ofexample.com/users.php
.RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]
Remove Trailing Slash
This snippet will redirect paths ending in slashes to their non-slash-terminated counterparts (except for actual directories), e.g.
http://www.example.com/blog/
tohttp://www.example.com/blog
That is important for SEO since it’s recommended to have a canonical URL for every page.RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$ RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]
Force HTTPS
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} # Note: It’s also recommended to enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) # on your HTTPS website to help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. # See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/HTTP_strict_transport_security <ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains"</ifmodule>
Force HTTPS Behind a Proxy
Useful if you have a proxy in front of your server performing TLS termination.
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
PS
checkout
https://www.nginx.com/products/ they are great!
Tom
Alias “Clean” URLs
This snippet lets you use “clean” URLs -- those without a PHP extension, e.g.
example.com/users
instead ofexample.com/users.php
.RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]
-
<code class="language-htaccess" style="padding: 2px 6px; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; border-radius: 3px; text-shadow: #ffffff 0px 1px; word-break: normal; word-wrap: normal; tab-size: 4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial;">Glad I can help Try useing this to check it http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php </code>
`#removes trailing slash if not a directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]
or
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/remove-file-extention-from-urls/Take the / off the end of this
https://regex101.com/r/oK8xL9/3 like this` ^((?:\w+/\w+)+)$Seach & replace might be needed
<code class="language-htaccess" style="padding: 2px 6px; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; border-radius: 3px; text-shadow: #ffffff 0px 1px; word-break: normal; word-wrap: normal; tab-size: 4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial;">Hope that helps, Tom</code>
-
Brilliant!
Thank you so much Thomas!!! I will see what I can do about cleaning this all up!
I believe I have located it the issue. The redirects are occurring after a base rewrite rule:
Rewrite URLs to / from .html. SEO friendly. Added by David Turner 12/26/15
RewriteBase /
Rewrite requests for index.php to directory to avoid 500 errors when added to paths. Added by David Turner 12/30/15
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]remove the .html extension
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.).html\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.).html$ $1 [R=301]remove index and reference the directory
RewriteRule (.*)/index$ $1/ [R=301]
remove trailing slash if not a directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$
RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301]forward request to html file, but don't redirect (bot friendly)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteRule (.*) $1.html [L]Moving the 301s above these and cleaning these up a bit should restore the 301 redirects properly and regain Moz PA.
-
Found it your non-https .php URL has backlinks & you are 301 redirecting it to the "/" URL.
After that redirects to the non-/. Thus creating a redirect chain
You need to redirect the non-HTTPS version of the site/URL to the non-/ version of the site. This will give you the domain and page authority that you are missing.
I confirmed the back links using majestic.com
Result
http://www.ultrawebsitehosting.com/hosting-dedicated.php backlinks
301 Moved Permanently
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers/
301 Moved Permanently
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers lost PA when redirected so many times.
200 OKHTTP Headers
301 Moved Permanently
| Status: | 301 Moved Permanently |
| Code: | 301 |
| Server: | UltraSpeed Hosting by UltraWebHosting.com |
| Date: | Sun, 03 Apr 2016 23:42:41 GMT |
| Content-Type: | text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 |
| Content-Length: | 258 |
| Connection: | close |
| Location: | https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers/ |
301 Moved Permanently
| Status: | 301 Moved Permanently |
| Code: | 301 |
| Server: | UltraSpeed Hosting by UltraWebHosting.com |
| Date: | Sun, 03 Apr 2016 23:42:47 GMT |
| Content-Type: | text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 |
| Content-Length: | 257 |
| Connection: | close |
| Location: | https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers |
| X-Cache: | HIT from Backend |
200 OK
| Status: | 200 OK |
| Code: | 200 |
| Server: | UltraSpeed Hosting by UltraWebHosting.com |
| Date: | Sun, 03 Apr 2016 23:42:48 GMT |
| Content-Type: | text/html |
| Content-Length: | 40741 |
| Connection: | close |
| Vary: | Accept-Encoding |
| Last-Modified: | Fri, 01 Apr 2016 02:03:57 GMT |
| Access-Control-Allow-Origin: | * |
| X-Cache: | HIT from Backend |
| Accept-Ranges: | bytes |Features
This Redirect Checker supports several features like:
- · Select different User Agents like
· Desktop-Browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox,...)
· Mobile Devices (IPad, Iphone, Android, Windows Phone, Kindle, Nokia...
· Search Engine Bots (GoogleBot, Google Mobile Bot, Yandex, BingBot, Baidu, Yahoo Slurp, Naver,... - · checking 302 and 301 redirects
- · supports & checks https redirects
- · checks meta refresh redirects
- · analysis of common javascript redirects
- · check and show redirect chains
- · check http headers like Status Code, X-Robots-Tag, Rel Canonical Header Tag "Link:"
- · Select different User Agents like
-
I did not show what the PA was when I dropped the /
its 0 but when I add it is PA 28 see & try it.
Video of what I'm saying http://cl.ly/faXF
-
The 301 has to point to the / it shows PA
I'm about to grab dinner when I get back I will do it deep crawl your site and I'll find out the problem for you because it's definitely not a hard issue to figure out and I will dedicate some time to find out.
-
The 301 redirect has existed for 4 months and a day. Why has it not assumed PR with Moz?
-
It's because there are back links pointing to the URLs that you redirected to dedicated servers for instance. The others have no back links therefore they do not have any page rank.
-
The original question is if it is a factor for the trialing slash to not exist as I am seeing Moz PRs of 1 on these pages after four months.
I appreciate all the rewrites but this is all common knowledge to me.
-
Was not able to fix the problem? If not you may want to force a / with a /?$ that way it will only be forced if needed.
Hope that helps, Tom
-
Hello Thomas,
Thank you for your time.
Redirect 301 /hosting-dedicated.php https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers
has been set since 01/02/16 via .htaccess
I have removed the duplicate access-control as one was arbitrating font extensions and the other everything.
-
Try //Rewrite to www
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ultrawebhosting.com[nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ultrawebhosting.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
//301 Redirect Old File
Redirect 301 .php /
See http://www.askapache.info//2.3/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectmatch
Sorry for all the duplicate stuff everything posts that way is annoying sorry about that. Nevertheless, you have to remove the PHP from your site. And redirect it correctly.
Let me know if that helps,
See below
|
Purpose
|
Example formatting
Include an entire directory but nothing beneath it
|
http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/
^/shop/?$
Include all subdirectories
|
http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/*
^/shop/.*
Include a single file
|
http://www.yourdomain.com/shop.php
^/shop.php
Include any file of a specific type
|
^/shop/.*.php – any php file
|
-
Look at this http://cl.ly/faXF
compare with
It is still showing up with .php
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/hosting-dedicated.php needs to 301 to
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers/
Its the .php & different link that has back links to it that is not properly pointing to it. Check
-
You have 2
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Server: UltraSpeed Hosting by UltraWebHosting.com
Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2016 08:06:06 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 34133
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 05:37:53 GMT
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
X-Cache: HIT from Backend
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
-
thank you for providing me with that URL I will take a look right now
-
Unfortunately this does not quite answer the question. The structure is by design but I am having my second thoughts after reviewing Moz and seeing this occurrence. Why are all sub-directories which do not end with / have a moz trust of 1? This even occurs here in the community forum. When the DA is 56 and the pages have been around for four months and are all linked from the homepage shouldn't they have a PA? Is the lack of a trailing slash a factor?
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com
Ex:
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/about
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers -
Are your subpages subdomains? Or subfolders? I'm going to assume they are subfolders.
If you're domain authority changes because of your page, that would be the only thing that would make me think you're talking about a subdomain.
PA 63 & DA 56 your site will be crawled quickly because it has decent domain authority just because your homepage has high page authority does not mean the rest of the site will.
It is not unusual for a brand-new page to have little page authority you can check if your forward slash "/" is being forced use screaming frog, redirect mapper, or https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/
You can then force a "/" or prevent one depending on what you find. Using regex
Name: Redirect my contact page
Domain: www.domain.com
Source: ^/old-path/contact-us/?$
Destination: /new-path/contact-us/
Redirect type: 301 Permanent- This Redirect Rule will match a URL of http://www.domain.com/old-path/contact-us -or- http://www.domain.com/old-path/contact-us/
- The variation is because of the Regex Syntax “/?$”
- The Question Mark “?” makes the Trailing slash Optional
- It will also only match the Source if it Starts with a “/” (note the carrot “^” ), or ends with either “s” or “/” (note the ending “$” )
https://wpengine.com/support/regex/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16657152/matching-a-forward-slash-with-a-regex
This depends on your server, and what language are using so, I strongly suggest you use tool to verify your changes before making them.
https://regex101.com/r/oK8xL9/1
I hope this helps,
Tom
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
-
Switched from Wix to Wordpress dreaded hashtag URL
Recently took over managing a site for a non-profit which was using the dreaded Wix. Switched over to Wordpress but now Google still has the old URL's with the hashtag. Can't forward them in .htaccess and don't want to add javascript for fear of slowing down load time. I found a solution that seems like it will take hours and hours of work. I found the solution at http://www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/ but it seems like it would take hours with all the URL's. I submitted an XML sitemap in Google webmaster tools. My question is, how serious could this effect SEO for my site? Google accepted the new sitemap but still has the old URL's in SERP. How long does this generally take to remove? Will the hashtag URL's penalize the site for duplicate content? If so is there a way to tell Google the homepage without hashtags is the page with original content? Sort of like the rel=canonical tag which I know wont work as the hashtag URL's all redirect to the homepage so they will all have the tag. Does Google ignore the hashtag? Could there even be a benefit to this, possibly the homepage getting more page authority due to the redirects? How serious is this? Thanks in advancing.
Web Design | | limited70 -
Is there a way to redirect URLs with a hash-bang (#!) format?
Hi Moz, I'm trying to redirect www.site.com/locations/#!city to www.site.com/locations/city. This seems difficult because anything after the hash character in the URL does not make it to the server thus cannot be parsed for rewriting. Is there an SEO friendly way to implement these redirects? Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | DA20130 -
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site. We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic. I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
Web Design | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Does Google count the domain name in its 115-character "ideal" URL length?
I've been following various threads having to do with URL length and Google's happiness therewith and have yet to find an answer to the question posed in the title. Some answers and discussions have come close, but none I've found have addressed this with any specificity. Here are four hypothetical URLs of varying lengths and configurations: EXAMPLE ONE:
Web Design | | RScime25
my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (115 characters) EXAMPLE TWO: sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (126 characters) EXAMPLE THREE: www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (130 characters) EXAMPLE FOUR: http://www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (137 characters) Assuming the examples contain appropriate keywords and are linked to appropriate anchor text (etc.,) how would Google look upon each? All I've been able to garner thus far is that URLs should be as short as possible while still containing and contextualizing keywords. I have 500+ URLs to review for the company I work for and could use some guidance; yes, I know I should test, but testing is problematical to the extreme; I look to the collective/accumulated wisdom of the MOZVerse for help. Thanks.1 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
URLs with Hashtags - Does Google Index Them?
Hi there, I have a potential issue with a site whereby all pages are dynamically populated using Javascript. Thus, an example of an URL on their site would be www.example.com/#!/category/product. I have read lots of conflicting information on the web - some says Google will ignore everything after the hashtag; other people say that Google will now index everything after the hashtag. Does anybody have any conclusive information about this? Any links to Google or Matt Cutts as confirmation would be brilliant. P.S. I am aware about the potential issue of duplicate content, but I can assure you that has been dealt with. I am only concerned about whether Google will index full URLs that contain hashtags. Thanks all! Mark
Web Design | | markadoi840 -
Should I Remove URL extentions for SEO?
We are having a developer design our website with Magento. I noticed the main pages such as About Us have no file extention in the URL. But the product pages have a .html file extention. I was once told to remove the file extentions. Are there benefits to removing the .html file extension and if so, is there a way we can do this using Magento?
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0