Trailing Slashes on Home Pages
-
I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed...
I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/
The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com
Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without.
I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.
-
Totally agree, it's kind of a non issue, improve the canonical if you can but really, don't sweat it.
-
Oh yes, thanks for that. I've read that page a few times. :S
Apologies for the confusion Alex.
Don't have a crisis of confidence anyway! If there's a canonical 99 times out of 100 (probably more) I'm sure Google would get this right whether it's the homepage or not.
What server is the site hosted on Alex? Or are the URLs controlled by a CMS?
-
That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.
This pretty much details it in full:
-
Hi Alex
Ah, crisis of confidence again!
I didn't think that this was the case though for the index page. I thought normalisation meant they were treated as the same page. As Marcus said, I can't 301 the example.com page to example.com/ .
-
Hey,
in an ideal world, make sure it is has no trailing slash. But, as per the Google specific recommendations, make sure both resolve as a 200 OK rather than redirecting / to non /.
Think about it -
The browser removes the trailing slash. Also, go to any big site, Google, SEOMoz - the all have no slash. But.. check it in webbug and they resolve on both.
For me, having a trailing slash on the root or anywhere is just something else for folks to forget to add if they are linking or some such.
Here I would just remove the trailing slash in your canonical if you can just to be sure but the usual rules don't apply on the homepage and www.example.com & www.example.com/ are regarded as the same thing.
I have constant crisis of confidence - i often wonder if I am making it up as I go along or somewhere down the history of all the hundreds of SEO audits I have done I actually learned something along the way! I have actually googled something that I was unsure about and found my own blog post about it before. I think, much like Homer Simpson, every new thing I learn now pushes out an older thing!
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus
I agree out outside of the home page it's an issue (& good answer btw) but it's only the index page I'm worried about.
It's that crisis of confidence that I'm sure we all get from time to time as to whether something rather simple/fundamental is actually as we believe it to be.
I've been re-reading this document http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 and I think it's section 3.2.6 (if I remember right) that covers normalization of the root URL's.
-
The two versions you speak of are treated as duplicate content. Ideally you should make sure the URL is the same everywhere, and 301 redirect to your preferred version. Are you sure the browser itself isn't removing the trailing slash? I know Chrome does on non-directory pages.
Saying that, if you have a canonical tag it shouldn't cause a massive problem, but it will help to do everything properly. Do everything you can to make sure all links under your control are the same version.
-
Hey Alex
There is a good overview of this here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Outside of the homepage, a slash url and a non slash URL are regarded as two seperate pages so are technically duplicates. Now, Google will generally deal with this but it is not optimal (which is what we are all about eh) so you should make a call and either go / or no / and then 301 the other version to the default.
The homepage should resolve on both and 200 for both and not redirect to the non slash. The browser will generally remove the slash on a root URL.
This is from the above link:
Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.
If you are using a CMS there are usually plugins or configuration options to enforce a slash if that is your preferred option.
The big deal here is to
A - be consistent
B - 301 the alternative to the preferred for crawl optimisation and to ensure no daft duplication issues crop up.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
HTTPS for form pages?
I am creating a small business website for a friend in Recruitment. It’s very small and mainly just a shop window for the business. There’s no login area for the website, but there are two areas were users can enter information: General contact us form (giving email and phone number) Applying for a job (attaching a resume) The forms are using Ninja Forms – which I believe are secure in passing information. But am I missing anything? Do I need to make these pages https at all? I’m quite new to building sites from scratch. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | joberts0 -
Why are crawlers not picking up these pages?
Hi there, I've been asked to audit a new subdomain for a travel company. It's all a bit messy, so it's going to take some time to remedy. However, one thing I couldn't understand was the low number of pages appearing in certain crawlers. The subdomain has many pages. A homepage, category pages then product pages. Unfortunately, tools like Screaming Frog and xml-sitemaps.com are only picking up 19 pages and I can't figure out why. Google has so far indexed around 90 pages - this is by no means all of them, but that's probably because of the new domain and lack of sitemap etc. After looking at the crawl results, only the homepage and category (continent pages) are showing. So all the product pages are not. for example, tours.statravel.co.uk/trip/Amsterdam_Kings_Day_(Start_London_end_London)-COCCKDM11 is not appearing in the crawl results. After reviewing the source code, I can't see anything that would prevent this page being crawled. Am I missing something? At the moment, the crawl should be picking up around 400+ product pages, but it's not picking up any. Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
How do I fix issue regarding near duplicate pages on website associated to city OR local pages?
I am working on one e-commerce website where we have added 300+ pages to target different local cities in USA. We have added quite different paragraphs on 100+ pages to remove internal duplicate issue and save our website from Panda penalty. You can visit following page to know more about it. And, We have added unique paragraphs on few pages. But, I have big concerns with other elements which are available on page like Banner Gallery, Front Banner, Tool and few other attributes which are commonly available on each pages exclude 4 to 5 sentence paragraph. I have compiled one XML sitemap with all local pages and submitted to Google webmaster tools since 1st June 2013. But, I can see only 1 indexed page by Google on Google webmaster tools. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/US/Alabama/Vinyl-Banners http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/MO/Kansas-City/Vinyl-Banners and so on... Can anyone suggest me best solution for it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
150 products 301 redirect to HOME page, any impact?
If redirect 150 products to the home page, will I be penalize? It does not look like I can have access to cPanel on this platform, BigCommerce and i moves my old domain to this plateforme, the only option I might have his to redirect everythings to home page. Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
HTTPS attaching to home page
Hi!! Okay - weird tech question. Domain is http://hiphound.com. I have SSL attaching to checkout and my account pages. Tested and works well. Issue - I am able to reach the home page at https://hiphound.com AND http://hiphound.com. If I access the home page via HTTPS and click on a link (any link) then the site is redirected to HTTP again which is good. My concern is the home page displaying via HTTPS and HTTP. Is this is an issue that can be resolved or is it expected behavior I have to live with.? I am being told by DEV there is nothing they can do about it but want to understand why and if they are correct. Thoughts? Thank you!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0