Trailing slash and rel="canonical"
-
Our website is in a directory format:
http://www.website.com/website.asp
Our homepage display URL is http://www.website.com which currently matches our to eliminate the possibility of duplicate content.
However, I noticed that in the SERPs, google displays the homepage with a trailing slash http://www.website.com/
My question: should I change the rel="canonical" to have a trailing slash? I noticed one of our competitors uses the trailing slash in their rel="canonical"
Do potential benefits outweigh the risks?
I can PM further information if necessary.
Thanks for the assistance in advance...
-
Thanks for the help George and participating in the discussion. I like the ease of the syntax involved with the non-www version, but I think people's and browsers natural inclination towards the www version makes it the most practical at this juncture. Perhaps if you're building a new site the less traditional non-www might be used, but like yourself, I also prefer the www.
Thanks,
Marty
-
It's really up to you and your marketing team I suppose. Maybe ask which sounds better (e.g. "for the best jambalaya in town go to www.jambalaya.com!" vs. "for the best jambalaya in town go to jambalaya.com!").
I prefer www.example.com myself.
-
Yes, I realized my typo after I posted, thanks. We do use the www version consistently, so no problem there. That being said, what's your take on the www vs non-www preferred domain structure, I've noticed some popular site (mashable comes to mind) going away from the www preferred domain -- just like to hear differing opinions if/when you have the time.
Thanks,
Marty
-
Yes, I realized my typo after I posted, thanks. We do use the www version consistently, so no problem there. That being said, what's your take on the www vs non-www preferred domain structure, I've noticed some popular site (mashable comes to mind) going away from the www preferred domain -- just like to hear differing opinions if/when you have the time.
Thanks,
Marty
-
I don't think you will lose any link juice.
I also don't think it matters which URL you use for domain root. That said, it would matter if you were using http://www.domain.com versus http://domain.com. Otherwise, I don't think you need to worry.
-
Hello George, thank you for your helpful response. While I knew it was the case for absolute URLs and subdirectories, I was unsure whether it also pertained to the root domain. The link provided a helpful explanation, although SEO's have been, "reasonably sure that just about all search engines will be normalizing all those URLs to be the same," in the past only to have those certainties change unexpectedly. That being said, I think the forum made a good point in saying,"search engines generally don't want to deliberately add duplicates to their index."
With our canonical URL set to www.domain.com , do you believe there will be any loss of link juice with backlinks using both the domain.com and domain.com/ , or will it just be a better indicator to the search engines that both URLs are one in the same? Also do you think it matters that the domain root with the trailing slash is the one that shows up in the Google SERPs? --- to me that seems to indicate that Google prefers the root domain in directories to have a trailing slash
-
Hi Marty, there is really no difference between root domain URLs with or without trailing slashes.
Note, however, that this is not true for absolute URLs: http://www.example.com/page is not the same as http://www.example.com/page/. For absolute URLs that are not the root domain, you need to be pretty explicit about whether or not it has a trailing slash. Many content management systems (e.g. WordPress) will let you choose to have trailing slashes or not.
At this point, I don't think you need to do anything with your homepage canonical URL since it is the same as adding a trailing slash.
Hope this 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
-
In Search Console, why is the XML sitemap "issue" count 5x higher than the URL submission count?
Google Search Console is telling us that there are 5,193 sitemap "issues" - URLs that are present on the XML sitemap that are blocked by robots.txt However, there are only 1,222 total URLs submitted on the XML sitemap. I only found 83 instances of URLs that fit their example description. Why is the number of "issues" so high? Does it compound over time as Google re-crawls the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Are "Powered By..." type footer backlinks good or bad for SEO?
Hi guys, We're running a software company which is also selling WP themes amongst other things. We've heard recently that footer backlinks like "Powered by BigBangThemes" might do more harm than good. Some clients usually forget to change them - so we want to make sure we stop including them in case this is true. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
"near me" campaign
I'm looking at running a campaign to get a site ranking for terms that include "near me" so for instance, "personal trainers near me", "yoga lessons near me" I'm wondering if this should be a local campaign because of the the "near me" in the term and Google basing results on IP addresses of the searcher (if that's possible possible instead of town names) or will it come down to words on the page including "near me" Any help or examples would be hugely appreciated, thanks community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Best Way To Go About Fixing "HTML Improvements"
So I have a site and I was creating dynamic pages for a while, what happened was some of them accidentally had lots of similar meta tags and titles. I then changed up my site but left those duplicate tags for a while, not knowing what had happened. Recently I began my SEO campaign once again and noticed that these errors were there. So i did the following. Removed the pages. Removed directories that had these dynamic pages with the remove tool in google webmasters. Blocked google from scanning those pages with the robots.txt. I have verified that the robots.txt works, the pages are longer in google search...however it still shows up in in the html improvements section after a week. (It has updated a few times). So I decided to remove the robots.txt file and now add 301 redirects. Does anyone have any experience with this and am I going about this the right away? Any additional info is greatly appreciated thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz0 -
Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links. Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag. However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up? I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up... Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sfgmedia0 -
Google webmaster tools showing "no data available" for links to site, why?
In my google webmaster account I'm seeing all the data in other categories except links to my site. When I click links to my site I get a "no data available" message. Does anyone know why this is happening? And if so, what to do to fix it? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
Using the Word "Free" in Metadata
Hi Forum! I've searched previous questions, and couldn't find anything related to this. I know the word "free" when used in email marketing can trigger spam filters. If I use the word "free" in my metadata (title tag, description, and keywords just for fun) will I be penalized in any way? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
How permanent is a rel="canonical"?
We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point? In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b? I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoreyTisdale0