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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???

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  • GregB123
    GregB123 last edited by Jul 10, 2013, 9:43 AM

    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 Jul 10, 2013, 1:26 PM Jul 10, 2013, 1:26 PM

      Thanks you Chris and Gagan!

      Your responses were fast and valuable 🙂

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Modi
        Modi last edited by Jul 12, 2013, 5:40 PM Jul 10, 2013, 10:46 AM

        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 Jul 12, 2013, 5:40 PM Jul 10, 2013, 10:29 AM

          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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