To slash or not to slash - Going from no trailing slashes to trailing slashes sitewide
-
A friend has a large site and his dev team are about to launch with the sitewide addition of trailing slashes on urls, which are not on the original site. Both versions of the url work e.g. /example and /example/ and the dev team is reluctant to change back as it will take 3 days (developers hey?)
My SEO mind tells me this is a bad thing. Yes you could:
-
301 from non slash to slash but sitewide I don't like the idea because of the small loss in link juice x lots of pages.
-
You could canonical from non slash to slash but the non slash is the original and canonicals are supposed to point to the original version of the content.
-
Any thoughts appreciated
-
Couldn't the devs use the htaccess file to force the / version to the non / version?
-
-
That seems like too much work. I would do this instead:
- Add rel=canonical on the non-/ version
- Use htaccess to force the non-/ version
- And update the sitemaps
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
-
Old content with trailing `/` - What should be my new approach?
Dear team Moz, I'm investigating SEO issues for the site that dropped rankings over a period of 4-6 months; after conversion from old platform (xenForo) to new custom developed platform. The old version of the site was a simple xenForo based forum; with threads having standard url structure as like www.domain.com/threads/thread-title.{thread_id}/. Notice the trailing slash. We chose to keep the URLs intact during conversion to new platform; however the site still lost rankings. I'm sure there could be multiple reasons for it - but I wish to know if I should adjust the URLs - 1. By 301 redirecting all the URLs with trailing / to the URLs without /. 2. Leave the URLs as they were. I must also mention that the new site has several new sections; and the old forum is just one part of it. The rest of the site follows URLs without trailing / - as it's the recommended URL structure by Google. I'd really appreciate your suggestions on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaustubhKatdare0 -
Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
Hi guys, We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/living So, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash. However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule. Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers,0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Why has my home page replaced my sub-category page for set of keywords? Happened 2x in last 2 weeks for day or so only to fix itself. What is going on?
Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page. See screenshot below. As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th. See screenshot below. Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months. We have done no recent link building to this page in years. I don't understand what is going on. This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic. I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem. I checked our Search Console. No messages. No manual web spam actions. Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic. Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on? serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cajohnson0 -
Site Redesign Inconsistent Trailing Slash Issue
I'm looking at a site that has implemented trailing slashes inconsistently across multiple pages. For instance:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids
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?0 -
Sitewide footer links - bad or not?
Hi, Sitewide footer links, is this bad for SEO? Basically I see all the time the main navigation repeated in the footer, sometimes as almost something to just fill the footer up. Is this bad for SEO (im guessing it is) and can you explain why you think it is? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
URL Going Over the Last Page of Pagination - Post Webinar Discussion
**Discussion Question: **Lets say you have 33 pages of paginated content but someone lands on page 34+, what do you do? I just setup a variable on my site so when someone lands on a page that is over the page count they are redirected to the last page of the paginated content. My reasoning is the user is looking for the last page, so why not redirect them to it? Now I just saw in the latest webinar on ecommerce (by Everett Sizemore) that he recommends a 404… should I switch? Why a 404? Again, what do you guys do when you encounter this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Question about 301 redirect for trailing / ?
I am cleaning up a fairly large site. Some pages have a trailing slash on the end some don't. Some of the existing backlinks built used a trailing slash in the url and some didn't. We aren't concerned with picking a particular one but just want to get one set and stick to it from now on. I am wondering, would I clean this up within the same redirect in the htaccess file that takes care of the www and non www? example RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301] I currently use that to redirect the www. to the non www as you can see. However here is what I was confused about. Would this code be enough to redirect ALL pages with a / to the ones without? or would I also need to add another code (so there is 2) to my htaccess like below? RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301] That way, now, even the non www pages with a trailing slash will redirect to the non www without the trailing slash. Hopefully you understand what I am getting at. I just want to redirect EVERYTHING to the non www WITHOUT a / Thank you Jake0