Forced Trailing Slash on PHP Pages In Google!
-
Hi, have never seen this before so am hoping soemone can shed some light!
Google seems to be forcing a trailing slash at the end of our php pages within the search results.
For example, Google is indexing http://www.kingstoncabinets.co.uk/heat-convection.php/ (trailing slash) rather than http://www.kingstoncabinets.co.uk/heat-convection.php (without slash).
The trailing slash page doesn't display properly and has no page authority.
I've ran the site through Screaming Frog and there are no internal links the the trailing slash URL's, nor does there seem to be any external links to these pages.
Why is Google forcing the slash?
Am confused
-
Thanks Martin, not 301'd the pages before so it's still a mystery why this has happened! They're not new pages, been around for years without this problem!
We're aware of the underscore issue, this is how we found the URL's when we took over SEO, as the pages are ranking well I feel it best to leave as is.
Thanks again, Lee
-
Looks like you've managed to fix the issue then, because your SERP listings seem to be without the trailing slash
Had you previously done 301's to the new URLs? Sometimes that can cause issues if the page structure is not the same on the new site as the old.
And just as a pointer, underscores aren't usually advisable for URLs any more, you're better using hyphens instead
-
Many thanks Martin, appreciate the feedback!
We've 301'd the following trailing slash pages to the non-slash pages so hopefully this should resolve the problem.
http://www.kingstoncabinets.co.uk/wooden_white_oak_radiator_covers.php/
http://www.kingstoncabinets.co.uk/designer_radiator_covers_designs.php/In answer to your questions;
1. No cononicals on the issue pages
2. No problems with the .htaccess file.
Am just confused why this has happened!
Thanks again, Lee
-
Okay, here's a couple of things to look at first.
1. Rel Canonical: if you have tags in your section, do they have trailing slashes?
2. What's in your .htaccess file (or web.config?). I just accessed the page without a trailing slash so this might not be the problem.
Lastly, I've just done site:kingstoncabinets.co.uk and I'm not seeing any trailing slashes, did you find the issue already?
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
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
How to enable lost trailing slash redirection in WordPress with Yoast plugin
Hi, We have lost the non-slash to slash URL redirection in our WP site. We are using Yoast SEO. All the settings are normal and we have enabled the related code in .htaccess too. Still we couldn't able to find why we lost. Please help. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does Google View "SRC", "HREF", TITLE and Alt tags as Duplicate Content on Home Page Slider?
Greetings MOZ Community. A keyword matrix was developed by my SEO firm. I am in the process of integrating primary, secondary and terciary phrases into the text and am also sprinkling three or four other terms. Using a keyword density tool (http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) the results were somewhat unexpected after I optimized. So I then looked at the source code and noticed text from HREF, ALT and SRC tags that may be effecting how Google would interpret text on the page. Our home page (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains a slider with commercial real estate listings. Would Google index the SRC, HREF, TITLE and ALT tags in these slider items? Would this be detrimental to SEO? The code for one listing (and there are 7-8 in the slider) looks like this: | href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York">Class A Fifth Avenue Offices class="blockLeft"><a< p=""></a<> href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York"> src="http://dr0nu3l9a17ym.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/fsrep/houses/125x100/305.jpg" alt="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York" width="125" height="94" /> 1,340 Sq. Ft. $5,918 / month Fifth Avenue Midtown / Grand Central <a< p=""></a<> | Could the repetition of the title text ("lease a Prestigious Fifth...") trigger a duplicate content penalty? Should the slider content be blocked or set to no-index by some kind of a Java script? We have worked very hard to optimize the home page so it would be a real shame if through some technical oversight we got hit by a Google Panda penalty. Thanks, Alan Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
How to avoid content canibalizm? How do I control which page is the landing page?
Hi All, To clarify my question I will give an example. Let's assume that I have a laptop e-commerce site and that one of my main categories is Samsung Laptops. The category page shows lots of laptops and a small section of text. On the other hand, in my article section I have a HUGE article about Samsung Laptops. If we consider the two word phrases each page is targeting then the answer is the same - Samsung Laptops. On the article i point to the category page using anchor such as "buy samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops" and on the category page (my wishful landing page) I point to the article with "learn about samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops pros and cons". Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Dynamic URLs Appearing on Google Page 1\. Convert to Static URLs or not?
Hi, I have a client who uses dynamic URLs thoughout his site. For SEO purposes, I've advised him to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs whenever possible. However, the client has a few dynamic URLs that are appearing on Google Page 1 for strategically valuable keywords. For these URLs, is it still worth it to 301 them to static URLs? In this case, what are the potential benefits and/or pitfalls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
Google Filter? Drop from top first page to bottom second page?
My site has dropped from the first page top spots to the bottom second page, about 2 month ago. From time to time it reappears in the first page, is this some kind of google filter? How do I solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ofer230 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610