Trailing Slashes on Home Pages
-
I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed...
I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/
The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com
Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without.
I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.
-
Totally agree, it's kind of a non issue, improve the canonical if you can but really, don't sweat it.
-
Oh yes, thanks for that. I've read that page a few times. :S
Apologies for the confusion Alex.
Don't have a crisis of confidence anyway! If there's a canonical 99 times out of 100 (probably more) I'm sure Google would get this right whether it's the homepage or not.
What server is the site hosted on Alex? Or are the URLs controlled by a CMS?
-
That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.
This pretty much details it in full:
-
Hi Alex
Ah, crisis of confidence again!
I didn't think that this was the case though for the index page. I thought normalisation meant they were treated as the same page. As Marcus said, I can't 301 the example.com page to example.com/ .
-
Hey,
in an ideal world, make sure it is has no trailing slash. But, as per the Google specific recommendations, make sure both resolve as a 200 OK rather than redirecting / to non /.
Think about it -
The browser removes the trailing slash. Also, go to any big site, Google, SEOMoz - the all have no slash. But.. check it in webbug and they resolve on both.
For me, having a trailing slash on the root or anywhere is just something else for folks to forget to add if they are linking or some such.
Here I would just remove the trailing slash in your canonical if you can just to be sure but the usual rules don't apply on the homepage and www.example.com & www.example.com/ are regarded as the same thing.
I have constant crisis of confidence - i often wonder if I am making it up as I go along or somewhere down the history of all the hundreds of SEO audits I have done I actually learned something along the way! I have actually googled something that I was unsure about and found my own blog post about it before. I think, much like Homer Simpson, every new thing I learn now pushes out an older thing!
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus
I agree out outside of the home page it's an issue (& good answer btw) but it's only the index page I'm worried about.
It's that crisis of confidence that I'm sure we all get from time to time as to whether something rather simple/fundamental is actually as we believe it to be.
I've been re-reading this document http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 and I think it's section 3.2.6 (if I remember right) that covers normalization of the root URL's.
-
The two versions you speak of are treated as duplicate content. Ideally you should make sure the URL is the same everywhere, and 301 redirect to your preferred version. Are you sure the browser itself isn't removing the trailing slash? I know Chrome does on non-directory pages.
Saying that, if you have a canonical tag it shouldn't cause a massive problem, but it will help to do everything properly. Do everything you can to make sure all links under your control are the same version.
-
Hey Alex
There is a good overview of this here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Outside of the homepage, a slash url and a non slash URL are regarded as two seperate pages so are technically duplicates. Now, Google will generally deal with this but it is not optimal (which is what we are all about eh) so you should make a call and either go / or no / and then 301 the other version to the default.
The homepage should resolve on both and 200 for both and not redirect to the non slash. The browser will generally remove the slash on a root URL.
This is from the above link:
Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.
If you are using a CMS there are usually plugins or configuration options to enforce a slash if that is your preferred option.
The big deal here is to
A - be consistent
B - 301 the alternative to the preferred for crawl optimisation and to ensure no daft duplication issues crop up.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
Home Page Deindexed Only at Google after Recovering from Hack Attack
Hello, Facing a Strange issue, wordpress blog hghscience[dot]com was hacked by someone, when checked, I found index.php file was changed & it was showing some page with a hacked message, & also index.html file was added to the cpanel account.All pages were showing same message, when I found it, I replaced index.php to default wordpress index.php file & deleted index.htmlI could not find any other file which was looking suspicious. Site started working fine & it was also indexed but cached version was that hacked page. I used webmaster tool to fetch & render it as google bot & submitted for indexing. After that I noticed home page get deindexed by google. Rest all pages are indexing like before. Site was hacked around 30th July & I fixed it on 1st Aug. Since then home page is not getting indexed, I tried to fetch & index multiple time via google webmasters tool but no luck as of now. 1 More thing I Noticed, When I used info:mysite.com on google, its showing some other hacked site ( www.whatsmyreferer.com/ ) When Searching from India But when same info:mysite.com is searched from US a different hacked site is showing ( sigaretamogilev.by )However when I search "mysite.com" my site home page is appearing on google search but when I check cached URL its showing hacked sites mentioned above.As per my knowledge I checked all SEO Plugins, Codes of homepage, can't find anything which is not letting the homepage indexed.PS: webmaster tool has received no warning etc for penalty or malware. I also noticed I disallowed index.php file via robots.txt earlier but now I even removed that. 7Dj1Q0w.png 3krfp9K.png
Technical SEO | | killthebillion0 -
Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact. Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages. Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/
Technical SEO | | Blue-shark0 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Local City Pages
Anyone have any input on the tactics being used for a national company trying to target local city pages. For instance, you might be a national printing company and you are trying to compete against local printers in cities by creating a specific page for that city + print keywords.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
Hi, our site is www.in2town.co.uk and i am thinking of putting an article on my home page in the middle under where it says lifestyle news, and getting rid of the middle column and instead have the latest news there to try and get google to visit more. I would like to know if you think this would look messy and not user friendly and if you think if i did do it would it get google to visit the site more often. all day we are always adding articles but on the home page it only shows a few lines of the article so i am concerned that these few lines are not getting google interested in visiting our site more often. we were on page one with our site but now since the upgrade we are on page eight so we are trying to combat this The article would change each time we put a new article on the site. so the article could be on there for ten mins before a new one is there any thoughts on this would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Duplicate Version of Home Page Causing Problems?
Hello, I have a .php based site and i'm curious if how we split traffic is negatively affecting our rankings. Currently, if you visit Lipozene.com you are split 50/50 between two pages, indexa.php and indexb.php. These have identical content right now, and i'm curious if this has negatively affected our rankings. We've dropped off the SERPs for our brand term "lipozene" even though we are the official site and own www.lipozene.com . Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | lipoweb0