Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.
-
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?
-
Thanks mate! All i wanted to know.
-
No thats not a problem, SE will follow what you do, its if you have external links pointing to those pages is the proble, they will be 301 redirected and you will lose a little link juice. buyt if you dont fix it, you will keep getting teh problem.
If you have 2 external links pointing to url/ and url, then SE see that as 2 different pages each with one link. If you 301 it, they will see it as 1 page with 2 links, one a 301 redirect that loses a little LJ. My asumpution is that a 301 leaks 15%, others say a bit less, i wint go into who is right and wrong, we really dont know, but it is confiremmd that it does leak. so haveing 2 pages each with 1 links is not as good as having 1 page with 1.85 links. It would be better if you had both links pointing to the same verion of the page of cause.
Get that fixed pronto, then make sure all your internal links point to the correct version.
Do it site wide, as i said the search engines will ajust next crawl or 2. -
Hi Alan,
First of all thanks for the quick resposne.
At the moment there is no redirect - basically, both pages exist and as you said we have duplicate content and losing link juice. But because google has indexed some pages with slash and some without, i wasn't sure if we should set up a rewrite rule for all slashes to remove the slash OR just do a redirect for the individual pages.
E.g.
we have
example.com/page - not indexed
example.com/page/ - indexed
example.com/page2 - indexed
example.com/page2/ - not indexed
so im not 100% sure if i should individually set up redirects, or just rewrite to get rid of all slashes and lose indexing from google on the slashed versions.
Does that make sense?
Cheers mate,
-
This can be a big problem, I asume that your site 301 redirect to one or the other. All your internal links should point to the url that it redirect to. Every link leaks link juice, if you have a 301 it leaks twice. site wide this can mean a lot of link juice going up in smoke. there is not much you can do about the external links you already have, but if you fix the problem you can eliminate it in the future.
I have a tutorial on how to create a 301 to fix this for Windows servers
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-trailing-slashIf you want too provide your url, either here or private message, i can loook into this probllem for you.
I should also mention that SE's see the 2 urls with and without as 2 different pages and your rank is split
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
-
Huge e-commerce site migration - what to do with product pages?
My very large e-commerce client is about to undergo a site migration in which every product page URL will be changing. I am already planning my 301 redirect process for the top ~1,000 pages on the site (categories, products, and more) but this will not account for the more than 1,000 products on the site. The client specified that they don't want to implement much more than 1,000 redirects so as to avoid impacting site performance. What is the best way to handle these pages without causing hundreds of 404 errors on site migration day? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
Which is better /section/ or section/index.php?
I have noticed that Google has started to simply link to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php and I haven't changed any canonical tags etc. I have looked at my pages moz authority for the two /section/ = 28/100
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes
/section/index.php = 42/100 How would I go about transferring the authority to /section/ from /section/index.php to hopefully help me in my organic serp positions etc. Any insight would be great 🐵0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Why Google scrambles/change our product page titles? And descriptions too?
Here is an interesting issue we are noticing lately: Google is always more scrambling and changing the title of our product pages in the SERPs results. Here is an example: Keyword: "bach arioso sheet music". We are down at the 6th spot, and the shown title is different from what's defined inside the TITLE tag of that page. And that appears often for other keywords/product pages. Why's that? How can we control that? It is hard for us to optimize titles and test CTR and other metrics if Google is showing them differently to the users. Similar issue with the description tag: sometimes Google instead of showing to the users the description tag contents, shows part of the text taken from the page even though the searched keywords are included both in the title and the description tag, and so I can't find justification to show text taken from the page instead... it is quite difficult to understand the motivation beyond all this! Any thoughts are very welcome. Thanks! Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Would it be ok if my ccTLD (.au) has links pointing to my .com (main) site?
The main pages of my .au site are all in .au, but once you go to the inner pages, the users will be directed to my .com site. The .com will act as the content for the top pages of the .au. Would that be ok?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MicroSourcing_PRM0 -
Redirecting www.example.com to www.example.com/directory/
Hi All, There's been some internal debate going back and forth about redirecting the homepage of a site to a directory. There are a few different POVs circulating, one of which is that it's no different than redirecting to a /index page. Basically, the homepage is ranking for the keyword that we want the directory to rank for but I can't seem to justify placing this type of redirect. The content on both pages is different, but for the term both the homepage and the directory make sense to rank. Has anyone ever done anything like this before? Can anyone see any reason to do something like this? I believe this move would dilute the link value we currently have going to the homepage and potentially cause us to lose our #2 slot with the homepage in favor of a lower spot with the directory. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this/learn if anyone has experimented with this tactic. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamieCottle280 -
Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Hello I have assembled a list of web-sites that have "Links" section that has a list of persons` favorite tools. Those pages have a link to my competitor. I know my tool is just as good if not better and want to request a link. I`m thinking of sending an email asking for a link and offering a small amount of money for it. Questions: A) How much should I offer? Should I offer anything at all B) Is there an email style that someone can suggest that has been tested and proven to work for this type of situtation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellopotap0