Trailing Slashes and SEO
-
Hi,
We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine.
We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done.
I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
That's true, and you may be right. But as ignorant as I am, it's the very first time I read url slashes canonicalization is not best practice.
And I truly mean you are probably right, but yet I would like to see some piece of proof, like a video of Matt Cutts, an article on searchenginejournal, or something, before to call what was once considered best practice dead and buried.
-
Posted: Wednesday, April 21, 2010A lot has changed since then...
-
Google official blog think otherwise:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
-
You don't have to worry about a thing, Google is smarter than you think - a trailing slash more or less won't affect your SEO in any way.
-
Hi Massimiliano,
I'm too too sure why the development guys are having issues. I think it may be due to the already being rewritten from blog.domain.co.uk to domain.co.uk/blog - but I'll double check.
-
Blog Engine is just a dotnet framework. Use dotnet url rewriting to redirect properly, you just have to edit web.config to have iis redirect urls with trailing slashes to urls withiut trailing slash.
-
So if you're talking about www.mysite.com/blog vs. www.mysite.com/blog/ I think I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'd definitely see if you could set a rel=canonical on that page to point to one or the other though.
But honestly, your blog homepage isn't generally going to be a search target anyway....it's the blog posts themselves (and possibly the category archives or tag archives) that will be search targets. Plus your site's homepage, of course, and other non-blog pages.
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
-
Google Blogger Intergration, any SEO benefit?
I want to use google blogger for my website blog, we want to intergrate it into the existing website (which is why wordpress isn't ideal as there is no php) if the domain was www.blog.mysite.com will www.mysite.com still recieve the seo bonuses of having a blog? or does it have to be www.mysite.com/blog otherwise i have little use for a blog, what i also want to ask is how does it intergrate? i don't want the blog on my site to be like a 'window' into the google blog site as that defeats the purpose, i need the content to actually be on my site to ensure the seo benefits. Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | DanBrayfield0 -
What price should you pay for seo services
A friend of mine has a business site and he has said to me that he has been receiving a number of emails with regards to seo services. He is seriously thinking about using a company to help him as he does not have the time to promote his site and get it in the top of the search engines. Last week he asked me what price should he be paying for a small business site and to be honest i could not give him an answer as i have never used a company who deal with seo before. A lot of the emails he has received are from India, and i would like to know what is involved, do they need access inside your site and what price is a good price to pay. Normally i would have told him to learn seo himself but due to the lack of time he has i can understand why he needs a company to help him any help would be good
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does bait and switch redirecting affect SEO?
Yeah, the question might be an odd one, but I'm new to SEO. Currently we've been considering creating links to certain pages on our site that instantly redirect to a landing page like this (referring to it as bait and switch redirecting): http://www.ecornell.com/certificate-programs/human-resources-management-training/advanced-certificate-in-strategic-hr-management/crt/ILRASHRC1/?lp=http://info.ecornell.com/executive-certificate-in-hr-leadership%3Fls=xxx%26of=xxx This essentially causes the user to "hop" from the content page directly to the landing page. Now, the content page is indexed otherwise, so I'm wondering if time on page (which is basically 0) or anything else might affect page rank. Also, if this is something we shouldn't do, that'd be great to know too. It feels sort of dirty, but I can't find any resources telling me it's bad, or how it would affect pagerank. I've read about pagejacking, but this doesn't seem to fall into the same category. Thanks! Alan
Technical SEO | | amccarty0 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
SEO On-Page Planning - Wire Framing
This is open to discussion. I'm interested in getting help/opinions from others on how they plan their next SEO Project. What methods do you use for laying out On-Page Keyword targeting? Do you use any specific wire framing tools for laying out a large website? With larger websites, this stage is very important so I'd find it very useful to get help in this area. If you know of any useful threads covering this area, share them here.
Technical SEO | | Nick-SEOSpark0 -
SEO Yoast Help Needed
Anyone familar with SEO Yoast and interested in being hired to check out my settings for SEO. Thinking about 30 minute screen sharing session an helping me figure out what I am am doing wrong? Just cleaned up duplicates because of tags and now I see the images are getting duplicated as well as some of the titles. So new to Wordpress here I shine. Message me if you can help. Much Appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Wordpress Problems.. SEO-Yoast is Toast?
Hello; I have installed the WP Yoast Widget in my Blog, and 2 weeks, after my issues went away, they came back X's 300! lol So I uninstalled it, and my issues obviously got worse, and then I re-activated, and reset everything, and still got the 300+ issues. Is there a secondary plug in you would suggest, to run at the same time as Yoats, or theat will fix all issues? Ever think of making an SEOmoz Widget for WP since it is gaining so much popularity?? Thank you Great work by the way! Loved the Webinar today!
Technical SEO | | smstv0 -
Help with SEO
Hello, I am brand new to SEO and I'm learning on the go everyday. I am having issues with Google and getting any sort of ranking or analysis or even just traffic reports. I understand the site has never really been optimized so it might really not have any reports. So basically my real question is what helpful tricks or hints do you guys have that I can implement? Anything and everything helps. So far I have run the crawl diagnostics and I'm working on fixing the errors. Thanks fr your help.
Technical SEO | | Future130