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
-
Content hubs vs blog
Hey all! I work for a large healthcare company. We're in the planning stages of redesigning our website, and the question came up of whether we needed to continue with the patient-focused blog at all when we could simply incorporate the blog articles into the service lines they best fit with (i.e. an article about feeding babies solid good would go under the pediatrics section of the website instead of the pediatrics section of the blog).Anybody have an opinion/insight on whether the articles would get better rankings being dispersed to the services sections of the website instead of concentrated on a blog? Or would good internal linking make the whole question moot?Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MartyIHC1 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
How to analysis Responsive VS Dynamic site?
Hello Experts, Can you please throw your knowledge on How to analysis Responsive VS Dynamic site? Also please suggest best tool to optimize both type of sites plus if I have to optimize manually then what is the best way? It will help lots of people as currently google focusing more on mobile site so we can optimize our responsive and dynamic site. Pls suggest. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | adamjack0 -
Phone number formatting - Periods vs Dashes
Are there any best practices on phone number formatting regarding using periods XXX.XXX.XXXX vs dashes XXX-XXX-XXXX? What about using parentheses on the area code (XXX)XXX-XXX? This is regarding a phone number on a contact apge...
On-Page Optimization | | WorkhorseMKT0 -
EMD vs brand? I'm new to moz
Hi to all so this is my first month using moz tools. When I check my competitors and keywords, everyone close to google #1 is a emd site But with google always getting smarter, is it smart in order to compete to get an emd? So say I rank first page #9, or not at all for my brand, if since my site is a construction site, if instead of say abc construction.com I find colorado home builders.com etc would I maybe do better? Or would google give me a bad ranking? I am just so lost? One last question? If I did build a emd site then just pointed my brand to it, would this be good or stupid for seo? thank you for all advice and tips chris
On-Page Optimization | | asbchris0 -
Does a URL forward slash break up an exact match phrase?
I've seen some organisations implementing keyword phrases per URL with forward slashes in-between the keywords. Would this still work for broad AND exact match keywords when the search engine references the URL? Here's an example with the keyword being "scuola di lingue tedesco". http://www.esl.ch/it/adulti/scuola-di-lingue/tedesco/index.htm Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0