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    4. Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???

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    Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???

    Technical SEO
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    • GregB123
      GregB123 last edited by

      Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL.

      We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html

      I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags...

      Which should the canonical tag be???

      (without the backslash)

      or

      (with the backslash)

      Thanks for your help! 🙂

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • GregB123
        GregB123 last edited by

        Thanks you Chris and Gagan!

        Your responses were fast and valuable 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Modi
          Modi last edited by

          Hi Gregory,
          Its not a backslash (), rather a forward slash (/) you are referring to

          The forward slash indicates that the url is ended. This tells the search engine: the request stops here.

          Search Engines as correctly said by Chris does not differentiate between url with forward slash or without it - both are same. However, its advisable to have url ended with with forward slash to speed up the loading. To validate this - refer this excellent article - http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/why-urls-end-in-slash.htm

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • Chris.Menke
            Chris.Menke last edited by

            Gregory,

            Matt Cutts has said that it doesn't matter algorithmically--essentially, Google deals with both as though they are one. I'd go with whatever your web server defaults to serving.  If visitors normally get a trailing slash, canonicalize that, if they don't canonicalize on the URL without the slash.

            http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
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