OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
-
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be?
The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us.
Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
-
It makes perfect sense, thank you!
-
Okay, not to make everything more complicated, but it's generally best practice to force rewrite everything to lower-case. Technically, uppercase and lowercase URLs are different addresses, which gives way to duplicate content issues. That said, in the real world I've rarely seen this make much of an impact - it's more a case of crossing your T's and dotting your i's.
As an easier alternative to redirects and forcing lowercase, it might be easier to implement rel=canonical tags on all of these pages. This would tell search engines which version of the URL was "correct" and not worry about the others.
So all of these URLs:
www.example.com/folder/US
www.example.com/folder/US/
www.example.com/folder/us
www.example.com/folder/us/... would have the same canonical tag in the
Make sense? Hope I'm not adding additional confusion to the situation.
-
Thank you so much for the great response. I figured out why it is redirecting but now I'm even more confused.
The URL www.example.com redirects to www.example.com/folder/US. The URL www.example.com/folder/us (lowercase letters) redirects to the version with the trailing slash - www.example.com/folder/us/.
So apparently in OSE I typed in the lowercase version. Either way, they have a lot of different versions out there.
-
Hi Kellibean,
So technically, a folder with a trailing slash is different from one without. Although in reality search engines will hardly ever ding you for this, it's best practice to have one version redirect to the other.
For example, if you try to access http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ (with the trailing slash) it will drop the slash through a 301 redirect. This practice dates back to the old days of SEO when search engines weren't as sophisticated, and these 2 urls could be misinterpreted as duplicate content. Even though it is not as big of a problem today, it's still best practice (and I recommend) to do so.
OSE operates under these strict rules, so when it says "No Data Available" that means it has no link data available for that exact URL, even if it has data for it's trailing slash sister.
That said, without knowing the URL, it's hard to say why OSE detects a redirect. Sometimes what's visible in your browser doesn't match the server header information. I'd do a crawl of your site with Screamng Frog (free version) and check all your server headers, or use the MozBar to do it one at a time.
If you have a question about a particular URL and how it interacts with any SEOmoz tool, feel free to contact the Help Team (help@seomoz.org) and they can look into the issue for free.
Best of luck.
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
-
Trailing slash URLs and canonical links
Hi, I've seen a fair amount of topics speaking about the difference between domain names ending with or without trailing slashes, the impact on crawlers and how it behaves with canonical links.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
However, it sticks to domain names only.
What about subfolders and pages then? How does it behaves with those? Say I've a site structured like this:
https://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com/page1 And for each of my pages, I've an automatic canonical link ending with a slash.
Eg. rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/page1/" /> for the above page. SEM Rush flags this as a canonical error. But is it exactly?
Are all my canonical links wrong because of that slash? And as subsidiary question, both domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/ are accessible. Is it this a mistake or it doesn't make any difference (I've read that those are considered different pages)? Thanks!
G0 -
Changes to 'links to your site' in WebMaster Tools?
We're writing more out of curiosity... Clicking on "Download latest links" within 'Links to your site' in Google's WebMaster Tools would usually bring back links discovered recently. However, the last few times (for numerous accounts) it has brought back a lot of legacy links - some from 2011 - and includes nothing recent. We would usually expect to see a dozen at least each month. ...Has anyone else noticed this? Or, do you have any advice? Thanks in advance, Ant!
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
Technical SEO | | andromedical
thank you0 -
Web page is showing up on Google but doesn't show when it was cached, so is it indexed?
Hey everyone So I created a new page on a WordPress website, it was live for a few hours till I changed my mind & switched it back to a draft. Just out of curiosity I did the Site:www.example.com/Example search on Google to see if it had been indexed & apparently it had but when I click on cached to see what time it got indexed at exactly it's showing me an error. So does this mean it is indexed or not?
Technical SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Correct Redirect method for switching pages from .html to /pretty urls/
I have a customer that has all his site files as .html extensions and i'm going to rebuild this site into a wordpress site for easier management, regarding the new permalink structure, should i just do a 301 redirect on this?
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
Redirects
I have a question about 404ed domains and old domains. #1 A domain has many links to it, but has been 404ed for 4 months. Should I redirect to a page I own and is almost exactly the same content. Will the fact that it was once 404ed be an issue? #2 I have an old domain that has many links but has been stagnant for a long time. Are these links still valuable and I should I redirect them to an important page on a different site? Does penguin influence your advice?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Redirected Subdomain Development URLs Showing In SERPs?
I develop client websites within a subdomain of another website (with noindex, nofollow so that incomplete websites on the wrong domains aren't ever seen by web users). Then, when we launch a client's site on their own domain, we redirect all of the development URLS to the appropriate page on the new live site. (meaning at site launch, all pages on http://client-site.developersite.com would be set to 301 redirect to identical pages pages on http://www.client-site.com). This system has always seemed to work fine, but today I discovered 94,700 pages indexed by Google on my root domain and found that these were mostly old URLs of sites in development that redirect to the actual client sites. Many are several years old. Any idea why Google would be indexing these pages? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Google Webmaster redirect vs 301 redirect
OK assuming a client's website has the right tracking script (hopefully analytics isn't effected by this issue), ... what happens if the htaccess file has a 301 redirect to the www-address, but within Google Webmaster Tools, the address chosen to crawl by Google is the non-www address? How will Google handle and which address takes precedence in this situation? _Cindy
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0