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
-
SEO & IFrame problem
Hi All, I will try and keep this as simple as possible. My product page links to a separate page with an IFrame, giving my users the option to upload artwork for the product. The IFrame contains the external file upload site (mail big file). When finished, the user can use a button link to return to the product page to continue with their order. As soon as the page with the IFrame was crawled by Google, the IFrame page started to rank in place of where my product page used to rank, yet there is no content on the page relating to my product (just a file upload). So now users are visiting the IFrame via the same query which must be an absolute headache and not useful at all. I have tried the following: 1. Added a line in body text which contains an internal link pointing to the product page using exact match anchor text for the query. (This didn't work) 2. I applied a no index tag to the IFrame, and now my product page is no longer ranking at all. Can anyone help me solve this puzzle. I believe I might be missing something. Kind regards, Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Technical SEO - Where to begin?
Hi all, I'm looking to learn more about technical SEO. My background was digital marketing/PR where I learned the importance of links, of anchor text, of page speed, of improving UX signals, of SSL, utilising things like Google My Business etc. However, I find I am chasing my tail when it comes to things like understanding JS/CSS/log file analysis etc. I've tried reading so many articles on the subjects and I just find it so damn confusing. AnugalarJS/BackboneJS. Fetching & rendering, URL parameters...etc. I know from my own experiments that JS pages struggle to rank and I've created two very similar pages, one without JS, one with JS (which had far more links) and the non-JS page ranked far higher. So, I suppose I'm asking for some help with how to begin learning this stuff. I find the articles on Moz, Search Engine Land etc to be a bit confusing...maybe I'm not technically minded enough! Cheers, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
How to stop UTM affecting SEO
Dear Moz community, We are a directory website and have lots and lots of UTM. This is crucial as we want to measure visits through Google analytics. Moz as a tool is fantastic because through a site crawl it can spot all our duplicate pages. Needless to say, due to the amount of UTM's on different pages, we have lots of duplicate pages flagged up. I ideal solution is still having the analytics capabilities of the UTM, but not affecting our SEO where search engines will realise it is not a duplicate page - we're aware it is the same page we just want to track the source! Your help is greatly appreciated! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Eric0 -
Ajax, SEO and Angular
Hi all! We have a platform which includes a housing area which is created by ajax and angular. You can see a sample here:
Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-antwerp/student-room-accommodation It has a static version under which shows the first 18 rooms, the rest are generated by angular.
Also this static version has a dynamic text with around 400 characters. Is this the right procedure?
How would you suggest to do it?0 -
Homepage 301 and SEO Help
Hi All, Does redirecting alternate versions of my homepage with a 301 only improve reporting, or are there SEO benefits as well. We recently changed over our servers and this wasn't set-up as before and I've noticed a drop in our organic search traffic. i.e. there was no 301 sending mywebsite.com traffic to www.mywebsite.com Thanks in advance for any comments or help.
Technical SEO | | b4cab0 -
SEO basics for Q&A tool
Hi everyone, our company wants to launch a Q&A forum on our website. The goal is to keep the useres interacting with our website, generate leads (of course) and... last but not least... to generate UGC for our website (and Google of course)... [We organise career events with big companys for students, professionals, give career advice etc..] From a SEO perspective, I find the following points difficult to overcome: the possible problem of "thin" content, many URL's with a question and only 1 or 2 answers will not look good for Google, especially when there are a lot of it (Panda-Update). One solution could be to noindex pages with thin content, but imagine that you have an active community, this could take ages and we got other things to do... the problem of finding ALL content: what would be the best solution to make sure that G finds all UGC, even the older content? Would it be enough to link to older questions on the page of the actual question? Let's say, this page contains links to the 5 questions before and so on... Or should there be categories of questions, where you list all of the questions ever asked??? would you/can one optimise the content? Users do not ask questions with the beloved keywords and if there would be a standard solution that the URL and the Title-Tag contains the question, there could be a lot of strange/not useful pages on our domain... I hope I could make clear what my problems are and I hope someone can give me some good advice... Thanx!!
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Seo template for new website
I am revamping my website (www.UltimateBasicTraining.com). It's going to be major and I am concerned about the potential traffic loss since over 60% of my overall traffic comes from organic search results in the military basic training area. Are there any good SEO website templates I can start from? I see a lot out there but would prefer the advice of professionals. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TheVolkinator0 -
Switching Hosting & SEO
Hello friends, We are facing the prospect of switching to a new hosting account or company. We are currently using a third-party reseller account but are outgrowing that account. We are considering VPS and dedicated servers. However, this will mean updates for IPs and nameservers. Does anyone have experience with SEO consequences of making switch? Best practices? Tips? Obstacles? Any and all comments/advice welcome. We're trying to balance the potential SEO ramifications of making the switch with the consequences of reduced site speed.
Technical SEO | | Gyi0