Is it better to have trailing slash or no trailing slash in URLs and what if both variations work?
-
Hi I have a situation on a website where the links are structured like this http://website.com/myurl/ so anywhere you click you will land on a page with a trailing slash but if i remove the trailing slash like this http://website.com/myurl the page is still going to open the same content.
1. so it works with and without the trailing slash. is this considered as duplicate content by google? and if so what is the best way to go? should i redirect al the non trailing slash urls to trailing slash or the opposite?
2. if i redirect am i going to loose some link juice from existing external links which mainly already point to urls without th trailing slash.
3. i've noticed that the sitemap.xml contains links without the trailing slash .. should it contain the urls with the trailing slash?
Also there's many external links pointing to this site but withouth the trailng slash like this http://website.com/myurl
-
The problem you're describing is almost exactly the reason why canonical URL functionality exists. Just pick your canonical (with or without slash - it doesn't matter) and make sure you roll it out consistently across your website and sitemap.
Regards,
George
-
I would personally suggest you not to go for 301 as it will increase the page load time of the website which direct affects the rankings in search engines. I would rather prefer to choose the preferred version and use canonicals on every page of the website. This way Google will have an idea about what URL is the preferred and crawl the stuff accordingly.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi,
I would suggest that you verify whether 301 redirects are even a possibility. For example, if the website is hosted on IIS server, then the 301 redirect rule might result into a redirect loop. In such a scenario, I would suggest you place self canonical tag on the page. For example on the page domainA.com/page 1, we will have the following tag in the head section of the page -
For the PDF files, place the canonical tag in the header response.
On the links front - You will not be losing a lot
Regards,
Sajeet
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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
Automatically check if URL has been optimised?
Hi guys, I have a massive list of URLs and want to check if the primary keyword for each URL has been optimised. I'm looking for something similar to Moz on-page grader which grades the URL and primary keyword with a single metric e.g. grade a, b, c However, Moz doesn't offer an API to pull this score automatically. I was wondering does anyone know of any tools which you can access their API to do something like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Internal Links - Different URLs
Hey so, In my product page, I have recommended products at the bottom. The issue is that those recommended products have long parameters such as sitename.com/product-xy-z/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs The reason why it has that long parameter is due to tracking purposes (internally with the dev and UX team). My question is, should I replace it with the clean URL or as long as it has the canonical tag, it should be okay to have such a long parameter? I would think clean URL would help with internal links and what not...but if it already has a canonical tag would it help? Another issue is that the URL is different and not just the parameter. For instance..the canonical URL is sitename.com/productname-xyz/ and so the internal link used on the product page (same exact page just different URL with parameter) sitename.com/xyz/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs (missing product name), BUT still has the canonical tag!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Bingpreview/1.0b Useragent Using Adding Trailing Slash to all URLs
The Bingpreview crawler, which I think exists in order to take snapshots of mobile friendly pages, crawled my pages last night for the first time. However, it is adding a trailing slash to the end of each of my dynamic pages. The result is my program is giving the wrong page--my program is not expecting a trailing slash at the end of the urls. It was 160 pages, but I have thousands of pages it could do this to. I could try doing a mod rewrite but that seems like it should be unnecessary. ALL the other crawlers are crawling the proper urls. None of my hyperlinks have the slash on the end. I have written to Bing to tell them of the problem. Is anyone else having this issue? Any other suggestions for what to do? The user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Doubts with URL's structure
Hi guys i have some doubts with the correct URL structure for a new site. The question is about how show the city, the district and also the filters. I would do that: www.domain.com/category/city/disctict but maybe is better do that: **www.domain.com/category/city-district ** I also have 3 filters that are "individual/colective" "indoor/outdoor" and "young/adult" but that are not really interesting for the querys so where and how i put this filtters? At the end of the url showing these: **www.domain.com/cateogry/city/district#adult#outdoor#colective ** ? Well really i don't know what to do with the filters. Check if you could help me with that please. I also have a lof of interest in knowing if maybe is better use this combination **www.domain.com/category-city or domain.com/category/city **and know about the diference. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omarmoscatt0 -
How to determine URL Parameters in Google Webmaster
Hi there! I have a new website with so many duplicate meta titles and descriptions because of its expanded features from the e-commerce shopping cart that I am using like mobile website, product sorting, etc. Aside from canonical, is it advisable to use the URL parameters from Google webmaster tools to disallow crawling of mobile website and other parameters like, "parent", "catalogsetview", "pcsid", "pg" "mode". I appreciate and advise. 🙂 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paumer800 -
Canonical URL Tag Usage
Hi there, I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780