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
-
More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages
So my question is... I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword. I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same). What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so. The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging. What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect? Any help would be great. Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1231 -
Separate URL vs iFrame
Hi Everyone, I'm not a designer/developer and am an not extremely knowledgeable in SEO, but I'll try to be as clear as I can. One of the designers here is creating a recipe section on our website. He created it so that it's a container (or iFrame?) on the page. Basically, no matter what you click (different sections and recipes) the URL stays the same. I was told to find out from an SEO perspective if it's better to do things this way or have a separate URL for each section and recipe. It's been brought up that from a social/sharing standpoint separate URLs would be better so people can send a link directly to the specific recipe they want to share. Any thoughts/comments are appreciated! Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | AliMac260 -
Branding vs. Keyword Optimization for Company title.
I have a new SEO client that I am working on putting together an optimization strategy and have come across something that has me second guessing. Reach out to Moz Community... The client is a doctor who runs a tattoo removal clinic out of his office. Technically they are two separate businesses: doctors office and tattoo removal clinic. The tattoo removal clinic is my client. They have an independent website where they generate leads. The website is not the brand name. It is [city]tattooremoval.com. The logo on the site, heading, footer all reflect the web URL. The actual brand name for the company is used in all the directory listings, facebook page, google+, basically everywhere else on the internet. When drafting up new meta titles, putting together content, everything really, the website URL has primary keywords included making it way more convenient to use that. However I'm not sure how it will look to the search engines about having everything pointing to the site be one company title and when you get to the site not see the company title in the logo or titles and such. The company name is just down in the corner somewhere on the page. Anyone with any experience to a similar issue? On one hand I think I'm over thinking it, not having the brand name on the home page title tag shouldn't be a huge deal if the website delivers value to the customer. On the other hand I don't see a lot of companies that do this online in general (especially with larger brands), although research shows a many of companies in this niche using the [city] + keyword (or vise vera).
On-Page Optimization | | bricegump0 -
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 -
Wordpress & trailing slash on domain name
Hi recently changed my site so it is based on Wordpress, got my preferred domain set in Google webmaster as www.domian.co.uk but since moving to wordpress my domain is now having a slash put on the end of it like www.domain.co.uk/ Most of the links going to my homepage do not have the slash on the end so am I right in thinking I should get rid of the slash from my site so I have one consistent url? If so any ideas how to banish the slash? Cannot seem to do it through the Wordpress general settings (despite preferred domain being set as www.domain.co.uk !) Thanks T
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C0 -
Slash at the end of a url
I keep reading contradicting information, so I figured I'll ask here. What's the best practice for slash '/' at the end of a URL? Should it be idealchooser.com/search/laptop/ or idealchooser.com/search/laptop (no trailing slash)? The options: 1. Accept both equally 2. Accept 1 and redirect the other with 301 3. Accept 1 and treat the other as a wrong URL returning 404 Which would be the best for SEO? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | corwin0 -
Installing a site on top level domain directory VS deeper directory
How important it is for seo to install a site on a top level directory vs deeper directory? example: www.mysite.com VS www.mysite.com/catalog many eCommerce scripts such as oscommerce and cre loaded will install by default to /catalog and that's what I've been doing for most of my customer. does it mean it will be harder for them to get good seo results? Thanks in advance for the input...
On-Page Optimization | | zigi0 -
URL with two forward slashes //
We have a potential client with a URL structure in this fashion: http://www.site-url.com//cpage/page.html pretty strange, right? my question is: How bad are the 2 forward slashes // for SEO? How bad is it to have that extra layer of /cpage in the URL? this doesn't appear to serve any other purpose than making the URL longer than necessary.
On-Page Optimization | | Motava0
