Trailing Slashes on URLs
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Hi everyone
I have a question on trailing slashes in URL.
The crux of it is this:
is having both: example.com/subdirectory/ and: example.com/subdirectory on all of your subdirectories considered duplicate content by Google - or in some other way really bad?
We have done a heck a lot of research into this, and it would seem...no one knows for sure (it is easy to get lost in a sea of Webmaster tool forums from 2012). Google itself has both URLs for it's subdirectories (try https://www.google.co.uk/maps and https://www.google.co.uk/maps/) as does Moz; and yet there are some rumblings on the internet of people who think you must put a 'redirect' (although not really a redirect as it isn't a 301) in your htaccess file to one or the other (so for example.com/subdirectory/ would 'forward' to example.com/subdirectory); and this is what bbc.co.uk do.
We tried putting this htaccess 'forward' in as an experiment, but I noticed our site then stopped being fully crawled by Google bot, so we reversed it.
Can any one shed any light?
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Hi there.
There is the rule: do not show google duplicate content. So, having both, with and without the trailing slashes is an issue.
If you dont want or think is not necessary a redirect... you can set a canonical. As you said, moz doesnt have a redirect, instead has a canonical.Check it out: view-source:https://moz.com/community/q/
Hope it helps.
GR.
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