Slash vs no slash?
-
Why does SeoMoz tell me I have duplicate content issues and show me these two URLs?
What does the slash matter and why is that considered duplicate content?
-
On the homepage it does not matter, as no redirect is made to the slash, both return a 200 code
but on deeper pages it is a problem as it leads to canonical issues.
I prefer no slash because when people link to you by hand, they rarely add the slash on the end.Wordpress makes a mess of this, i have to say, i dont use wordpress so i dont know if its wordp[ress of a plugin, but almost all wordpress sites have un-neecessary redirects. That is internal links that go thought a 301 to get to the internal link, each 301 is a link juice leak, so why would you do this when the link is internal. Wordpress sites often use a 301 redirect to send you to a url with a slash, when the link should point to the slash or none slash, and there for not leak ling juice.
The first think i do when i build a site, is setup my redirects, to ensure a canonical domain, none slash( or slash one of the other), and make sure all urls are lowercase. These things are a nightmare to fix later.
-
Hmm... Wordpress has a built in fix. Just add or remove the trailing slash from your permalink structure. For the home page, you can just specify what the home page should be. Joomla, from what I can tell, requires some modification to the htaccess file... I'm not much of a Joomla fan and my Wordpress information could be incomplete, so if anyone has any corrections feel free to chime in.
-
Do you know of any plugin suitable for Joomla or Wordpress
-
The slash is minor, but it can create some issues... Search engines can figure out pretty easily which URL you mean but users can't. If users come to the site and decide to link back to you, the link can point to either mysite.com or mysite.com/. The PageRank is essentially split to what really amounts to two separate pages.
You should redirect one to the other. It isn't a huge deal and won't cause too many problems, but why leave something to chance with the algorithm?
If your site runs Drupal, I suggest downloading the Global Redirect plugin for easy across the board decisions about trailing slashes and other duplicate content URL issues.
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
-
Responsive site.com vs m.site.com
Hi All, My client's website have two urls like: site.com/a.html and **m.site.com/a.html. ** Will it hurt google rankings for this website because there are version of a website? Please help!
On-Page Optimization | | binhlai1 -
Getting the Titles and Headings Right on Product Pages. Userbility vs SEO
Hey Mozzers, I am optimising a chaotic section of the site including many similar products. Writing unique content etc. The titles and urls were all over the place so my first job was to tidy them up so I could make some sense of the situation, especially as sometimes they didn't even match! I should point out were on Magento, so product name = Both the Heading and Title of the page, the meta title can be set separately. When i refer to title I mean both <title>and <h1></strong><br /><br />Before they existed as such<br />URL: domain.com/200-x-0-5-g-rs-232-balance.html<br />TItle: PC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br /><br />This format was (Product Code, Capacities, Resolutions, Accuracy, Product Title)<br /><br />The issue was all 60 products in a page followed this format. Navigating through the page was a nightmare and was just a jumble of numbers and highly confusing even to me who learnt what they all mean, especially when you had 8 products from the same range you got presented with<br /><br />APC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1235 500 x 1g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1236 1000 x 2g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1238 5000 x 10g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1239 10000 x 15g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1210 20000 x 25g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1211 50000 x 50g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance</p> <p>I changed them to something more user friendly.<br /><br />URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />This has seen the following benefits<br />- URL is now clear and means something to the user<br />- Product titles are easy to navigate and the page is more pleasing to the eye<br />- The jumble of numbers in the title are now all labelled and shown below each product listing in bullet point so the user can see the basic spec of a product without having to decipher any titles<br /><br />Upon reflection I has a couple of concerns I was hoping you could discuss, I am wondering if I have made the titles too simple.<br />1) I have no product code in the title<br />We have our own products manufactured and sell existing brands with their own product codes. Some of these can be lengthy. Adding them makes them hard to the eye and the page looked cramped.<br /><br />The codes are listed beneath each product title on category pages and on a list on the actual product page, but no where in the titles. <br /><br />2)None of our products have a brand listed in the title<br />None of the products on the site had brand names in anything but the images when i started and as such it snuck under my radar. But should i pre-fix all titles with a brand name?<br /><br />Should </p> <p>URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance</p> <p>become</p> <p>URL: domain.com/BRAND1-200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: BRAND1 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />My instinct tells me to change things to include brands as its useful to the customer and should have an SEO benefit, but to leave out product codes as they are accessible to the customer where they are now and dont make things messy and unreadable.<br /><br />As always, thanks for the input!</p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | ATP0 -
301 vs. keeping identical URL
Hey everybody! I have a question pertaining to our redesign. The situation is as follows: /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles gets a decent amount of views on out website, and we would like it to be on our redesigned site. I was curious what impact, if any, I would see given the two scenarios below. 301 to /alcohol-withdrawal make the new page /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles as well The second situation is that there are a serious of other pages which don't seem to be of drastic benefit, which I don't feel NEED to be on the website. For example: /post-acute-alcohol-withdrawal-treatment/drug-los-angeles /rehabs-resources/drug-abuse/sub-acute-alcohol-withdrawal etc It appears to me that the content on these pages is rather similar, and I feel like they don't really say anything special. Can I 301 them to the new page? Should I let them die in the black hat inferno they were made in? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | HashtagHustler0 -
Indexed/Submitted URLS vs Total Indexed
Hello, My site is www.colbysphotography.com. I have Total Indexed 195 while I have 87 URLs submitted and only 79 URLs Indexed. What is the difference and is there a problem? Thanks ahead of time,
On-Page Optimization | | littlecolby
Colby0 -
"og:description" vs. name="description"
According to Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing "OG description overrides meta description tag." Moz Crawl Diagnostics seems to ignore og:description and only look for meta name="description" - does that mean my meta descriptions tags should be meta name?
On-Page Optimization | | leighw0 -
www vs no-www duplicate which should I use
site is no-www I caught this in archives. Will this by my fix? Mike Davis Online Marketing Manager at McKesson May 22, 2013 Easy fix: in your .htaccess file, use this RewriteEngine On
On-Page Optimization | | touristips
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Remember to replace domain.com with your domain name.
Enjoy!0 -
Header Links vs. In Page Links
We have lost considerable rank for some of our top search terms (department names) and the rank loss correlates to a change we made on our homepage. That change was to remove a secondary navigation to the major departments in the content of our homepage. Now all we have is the global header navigation on the homepage (and all other pages on the site). I have read that in-page links pass more value than sitewide header links and I'm wondering if this is really true. These were text links (not linked images) and our header also contains text links (and some javascript). We did not make any other changes on our site at this time and this was not around the time of any major algorithm updates. The site is www.ebags.com.
On-Page Optimization | | SharieBags1 -
Absolute vs Relative URLs
What are the pros and cons of these two types of URLs and what type of weight does this hold. It doesn't seem to be a big issue in regards to ranking. Any qualified clarity would help.
On-Page Optimization | | Romancing0