Home page duplicate content...
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Hello all!
I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end:
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page?
rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />
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Hi Liam,
If you have a mix of slash and no-slash URL's, just make sure that they all forward correctly.
If you go to www.example.com/product/, does that forward correctly to www.example.com/product, or what does it do?
If you wish to PM me your URL, I will happily do a quick crawl to make sure there is nothing else that might cause you issues.
-Andy
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No problem Liam,
You can safely canonical your home page to itself. I've had 2 sites setup that way for a few years now.
Good luck,
Don
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I didn't want to force the removal or the append of a forward slash site-wide because "most" URL's (around 5,000 of them) don't use forward slash (products, categories, pages etc) - but there's a few pages that are part of the CMS such as account, billing, shopping cart etc that do use an appending forward slash. I think I'm going to give the canonical tag a shot for now - I can't see there being any negatives of using it on the home page to point to itself - it's just I've not heard of many people have to use it on the home page!
EDIT: Interesting. I viewed the source of http://www.moz.com/? - to see if they were using a home page canonical tag, and they were!
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HI Liam,
Yes you can fix this with a canonical tag or you can do a blanket fix that redirects all "/" urls to the non-slash version with .htaccess.
This should work in the .htaccess file
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
Hope it helps,
Don
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Hi Liam,
To enforce a no trailing slash policy sitewide, you need to do this in the .htaccess file. You do this by adding the following:
**`RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]`** If you wanted to enforce a trailing slash policy, you would instead add this.
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f RewriteRule^(.*[^/])$ /$1/[L,R=301]
-Andy
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