Rebranded Website Uses a Forward Slash /at End of URS-Is This Considered a Redirect?

[Kingalan1]

Our website was rebranded and relaunched. The old site did not use a / at the end of the URL. The site uses a forward slash at the end of the URL.

My developer claims that this makes no difference, that in Google's eyes this is meaningless. My concern is that link juice will be lost because this necessitates a redirect. Links that were developed in the last few months now are redirected to the identical domain, but with a backslash at the end.

Is this something to be concerned about or is it meaningless?

Thanks, 
Alan

[effectdigital]

301 redirects will almost assuredly be utilised to keep this maneuver SEO-friendly. but wait! 301 redirects fail to translate 'most' of the SEO authority from one page to another, in two key situations. If the content is too dissimilar on the destination URL, 301s can fail to port authority across

For you, this won't be a big issue as (from the sounds of it) the pages will be almost identical, byte for byte. The new pages may be very, very slightly larger due to having source code that contains more instances of the character "/" but that's not something which would phase Google at all

Another situation where 301s can fail to move all the SEO authority across is when redirect chains occur. But you're just 301-ing "non trailing /" URLs to "trailing /" URLs, so it shouldn't be a problem right? Hmmm there are ways you could come unstuck here

Let's imagine we have a hypothetical retail site called "buymyproducts.com"

Let's imagine that a few years ago, the site used to be on HTTP (insecure) and has moved over to HTTPS (encrypted)

All pages were influenced by a HTTPS-injecting redirect, let's create and example:

http://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product

was 301 redirected to

https://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product (with HTTPS)

That redirect rule now sits within the web.config or .htaccess file and waits for insecure requests, redirecting as appropriate

Now we want a new redirect rule, and it will affect the page like this:

https://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product

will be 301 redirected to

https://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product/ (with a trailing slash)

That seems fine, but when the oldest architecture is queried, you'll end up with redirect chaining like this:

A) http://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product

will be redirected to

B) https://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product (with HTTPS)

which will then be redirected to

C) https://buymyproducts.com/product-category/product/ (with HTTPS and a trailing slash)

... so as you can see, your redirects will begin to chain unless you foresee that problem up-front and write 'more complex' redirect rules that just connect A to C whilst entirely skipping B.

If the site existed on the oldest architecture (no trailing slash, insecure / HTTP) for the longest time (say 7 out of 10 years) then it's likely that many of the best links will still be hitting the very oldest architecture in terms of link destinations. Those backlinks won't translate into SEO authority for your site (very well) if your redirects begin to chain-up

To stop yourself from losing large chunks of legacy-authority, you'd have to do the redirects really well and ensure that your developer's rules do not ever begin to chain. If they are confident that they can avoid this chaining by writing much more complex redirect rules then go for it. If not, hold off

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS See

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-trailing-slashes-url-24943.html

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

https://www.seoblog.com/2018/05/remove-trailing-slash-urls/

Hope this helps,

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

It’s the same domain?

What was the changed about the site structure other than forcing a forward slash?

I would ask your dev to do a search and replace on the URLs putting them back to non “/“ then 301 t force a non forward slash you got a pick one or the other.

But if I was making a new site from scratch I would force use a forward slash.

Hope this helps,

Tom