Site Redesign Inconsistent Trailing Slash Issue
-
I'm looking at a site that has implemented trailing slashes inconsistently across multiple pages.
For instance:
http://www.examplesite.co.uk/ (WITH)
http://www.examplesite.co.uk/product-range (WITHOUT)
http://www.examplesite.co.uk/product (WITHOUT)
http://www.examplesite.co.uk/blog/ (WITH)
http://www.examplesite.co.uk/blog/blog-article/ (WITH)The blog was created later in Wordpress which is one of the reasons why this issue exists.
Looking at the inbound links unsurprisingly the lions share go to the home page but lots of other pages have links as well, particularly the product pages, no to many to the blog pages.
This pattern is similar in terms of which pages rank, the home page ranks well for a variety of phrases, the product pages also do quite well.
I know that ideally the URL's should be identical to the existing site, or if you have to you should 301 redirect old to new.
The client wants to switch the whole site over to Wordpress which will be default implement a consistent URL structure across the board, thereby changing at least some of the URL's no matter what I do.
I remember a Matt Cutts video that stated that even a 301 redirect will loose a clicks worth of link juice see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
The existing site has a poor UX compared to the new proposed design so this should help us.
Has anyone got any experience with a similar issue or any advice about how best to proceed?
-
Hi Justin,
Sounds like you already know what you're doing!
I would proceed with exactly what you have said and wouldn't be worried at all about the loss of authority between redirecting to a URL without a / to a URL with a /. The loss of authority will be almost insignificant and you will not lose your rankings or organic traffic from from doing this.
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
-
Technical Site Migration
Hello All- I have been in the SEO industry for about 4 years and feel fairly confident in my technical SEO; however, I am being asked to conduct a migration that is both a platform change (step 1) then a consolidation change (think of combining websites when a company is acquired) all within a 4-5 month time span. I feel like as I begin to create this multi-step checklist I would love to hear of others that have gone through something similar or have resources you could point me to form more of a process/procedure standpoint. Again - I feel confident in the technical output but I have a fairly junior team and want to execute this smoothly. Feel free to add recommendations or ask for clarification if my discussion question doesn't make sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instructure0 -
Hreflang implementation issue
We are currently handling search for a global brand www.example.com which has presence in many countries worldwide. To help Google understand that there is an alternate version of the website available in another language, we have used “hreflang” tags. Also, there is a mother website (www.example.com/global) which is given the attribution of “x-default” in the “hreflang” tag. For Malaysia as a geolocation, the mother website is ranking instead of the local website (www.example.com/my) for majority of the products. The code used for “hreflang” tag execution, on a product page, being: These “hreflang” tags are also present in the XML sitemap of the website, mentioning them below: <loc>http://www.example.com/my/product_name</loc> <lastmod>2017-06-20</lastmod> Is this implementation of “hreflang” tags fine? As this implementation is true across all geo-locations, but the mother website is out-ranking me only in the Malaysia market. If the implementation is correct, what could be other reasons for the same ranking issue, as all other SEO elements have been thoroughly verified and they seem fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Meta refresh for news site?
We have a news site that uses a meta refresh (<meta < span="">http-equiv="refresh" content="600" /> across all content. I understand the reasoning on the homepage and am trying to decide of the cons of using this (slows page, is it treated differently and loses pagerank/link ..) Does anyone have experience with meta refresh being a negative thing or does it no longer matter?</meta <>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristieWahlquist0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Need your thoughts on my site
Hi, This is my site: http://hemorrhoidssuccess.com/ I have got some decent natural links with a mix of different anchor texts. My main keyword is "Hemorrhoids Treatment", And i got very less exact match anchor texts. Now i was able to rank for "Top Hemorrhoid Treatment" on #2 Page, but i was not in the index for the my main keyword "Hemorrhoids Treatment". Can you review my site and let me know, what i am missing? Do i need to get more links? If so with what anchor texts? Will be waiting for your replies.. Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitss
Dhee0 -
Issues with Sub domains for dealers
I'm starting a new SEO project and am feeling a little overwhelmed due to the scale of it. I am not sure where to start and hope that someone has some ideas. Thousands of dealer websites reside as sub domains on gravelymower.com/ (e.g. http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/) The particular sub domain mentioned above is not showing up at all for any searches and is not cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/ I realize that pretty much zero SEO best practices are followed on page and the location is not on the page, but why is this sub domain not even being indexed by Google? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BridgelineDigital880 -
Site speed - query
When you say site speed, does it mean speed of loading of each of the pages of the website or speed of home page loading. What do site speed tools measure ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050