Trailing Slashes and SEO
-
Hi,
We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine.
We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done.
I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
That's true, and you may be right. But as ignorant as I am, it's the very first time I read url slashes canonicalization is not best practice.
And I truly mean you are probably right, but yet I would like to see some piece of proof, like a video of Matt Cutts, an article on searchenginejournal, or something, before to call what was once considered best practice dead and buried.
-
Posted: Wednesday, April 21, 2010A lot has changed since then...
-
Google official blog think otherwise:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
-
You don't have to worry about a thing, Google is smarter than you think - a trailing slash more or less won't affect your SEO in any way.
-
Hi Massimiliano,
I'm too too sure why the development guys are having issues. I think it may be due to the already being rewritten from blog.domain.co.uk to domain.co.uk/blog - but I'll double check.
-
Blog Engine is just a dotnet framework. Use dotnet url rewriting to redirect properly, you just have to edit web.config to have iis redirect urls with trailing slashes to urls withiut trailing slash.
-
So if you're talking about www.mysite.com/blog vs. www.mysite.com/blog/ I think I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'd definitely see if you could set a rel=canonical on that page to point to one or the other though.
But honestly, your blog homepage isn't generally going to be a search target anyway....it's the blog posts themselves (and possibly the category archives or tag archives) that will be search targets. Plus your site's homepage, of course, and other non-blog pages.
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
-
Add trailing slash after removing .html extention
My website is non www ,it has wordpress in subdirectory and some static webpages in the root and other subdirectory 1. i want to remove .html extention from the webpages in the root and
Technical SEO | | Uber_
the others static webpages in subdirectory.
2. add slash at the end.
3. 301 redirect from non slash to url with slash. so it should be http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles/ and http://ghadaalsaman.com/en/poem-list.html to http://ghadaalsaman.com/en/poem-list/ the below code 1. working with non slash at the end **2. **redirect 301 url with slash to non here's my .htaccess <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /</ifmodule> #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L] PS everything is ok with the wordpress , the problems with static pages only. Thanks in advanced0 -
Non-Existent Parent Pages SEO Impact
Hello, I'm working with a client that is creating a new site. They currently are using the following URL structure: http://clientname.com/products/furry-cat-muffins/ But the landing page for the directory /products/ does not actually have any content. They have a similar issue for the /about/ directory where the menu actually sends you to /about/our-story/ instead of /about/. Does it hurt SEO to have the URL structure set up in this way and also does it make sense to create 301 redirects from /about/ to /about/our-story/?
Technical SEO | | Alder0 -
SEO URLs?
What are the best practices for generating SEO-friendly headlines? dashes between words? underscores between words? etc. Looking for a programatically generated solution that's using editor-written headlines to produce an SEO-friendly URL Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ShaneHolladay0 -
SEO friendldy Site structure?
we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/ or
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO
www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks0 -
Which Wordpress Framework for Best SEO
Which wordpress framework would you use for SEO. From what I have had a look at: Thesis is good but you cannot use other SEO plugins with it such as yoast SEO as it is not compatible Genesis or woo framework are good and a plugin like yoast SEO works well with them. What are your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | VivaArturo1 -
Wordpress plugins for SEO
Hello I am new to wordpress I just have started using it. Can anyone suggest me some useful tools / plugins / setting for SEO? I am further intrested in sepeeding up Wp. Any good advive on wp an seo would be appriciated.
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
Changing DNS -- SEO implications?
Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?
Technical SEO | | stephen_reply0 -
Redirect links add seo value?
Does anyone know if urls on the 'Websites' part of a LinkedIn public profile create any SEO value (meaning, does page rank flow)? The links looks like this: <a href="/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Espeechpad%2Ecom%2Fpage%2Fspeech-to-text&urlhash=Xk3F" target="_blank" title="New window will open" name="overviewsite">speech to texta>
Technical SEO | | scanlin0