Aren't domain.com/page and domain.com/page/ the same thing?
-
Hi All,
A recent Moz scan has turned up quite a few duplicate content notifications, all of which have the same issue. For instance: domain.com/page and domain.com/page/ are listed as duplicates, but I was under the impression that these pages would, in fact, be the same page.
Is this even something to bother fixing or a fluke scan? If I should fix it does anyone know of an .htaccess modification that might be used?
Thanks!
-
Wow, thanks guys! This is indeed an enterprise level site, so especially thanks to CleverPhD for the breakdown on trailing slash v. no trailing slash. Redirecting as we speak.
-
You bet Jesse - thank you. I do work at the enterprise level and so it would make sense that this would become a bigger issue on larger sites. I would still say it could become an issue on smaller sites as people do tend to add the slash at the end and so you end up with a duplicate issue.
Full disclosure, I run sites due to legacy issues do not end with the slash. They run just fine. The key is to be consistent.
P
-
Interesting Clever, thanks for posting that. To be honest your points all make perfect sense. I've just never had that situation come up. To Frank's point, organization with or without slash doesn't matter much for smaller sites but as you said I can see how using the slash could make your analytics tracking much easier.
Perhaps it depends on the size of the site, but either way I hadn't thought of it in that detailed-a-manner and am glad you posted it.
Thanks as always !
-
As others have already mentioned, it is typically considered a separate page. Whether you choose with the slash or without is your preference. If a site is small I will typically opt for with/without the slash, but if a site is large and there are many different pages and the structure gets quite large I default to using the slash.
Not sure if the site you are mentioning is Wordpress based or not, if so there there are plugins that can help with this issue as well.
-
They are different and you need to setup 301s to correct, also check all your menus etc to make sure that you use them consistently - this includes in emails etc - consistency is the key.
You can go with slashes or no slashes, as long as you are consistent, I have run sites both ways.
I will disagree with Jesse one thing - I would strongly recommend using the ending slash. I have several reasons why.
-
The url ending in a slash traditionally represents a folder with pages/documents/images inside that folder. Used to be that we would use a URL like /folder/index.htm with index.htm being the default page. It used to be that if you did not designate any file as an index file, assuming the permissions on the folder were set correctly, you would see all the content in that folder. Later, you could designate a default index file and so when you left it blank by ending in a slash it would show the content of the default page without needing the index.htm to be included. Now this issue can cause duplicate content problems (but that is another story).
-
Knowing all that above, many of your web analytic and other reporting software would create reports using a given folder Google Analytics is a good one. If you use the conent drilldown tool, it automatically organizes your reports by looking at the slashes and then grouping pageviews and visits according to the folder structure.
3) Separately, you had development code that used the folder system in the url as a way to parse what the user wants and then deliver a page. This is why you can now have a url like /article/file and you do not need a .htm or .php or .html at the end as the server knows what to do with it without seeing the final extensions.
What happens then is that you end up with URLs like this
/toys/age6-8
/toys/age6-8/redball
/toys/age6-8/blueball
/toys/age9-10
/toys/age9-10/remote-car
/toys/age9-10/remote-control-train
You can see this is a toy store and they are grouping toys by age. Balls are better for younger children vs remote vehicles for older children. In your GA reporting, if you assume that a slash indicates a new folder
/toys/age6-8 would not be included in the report with the products as it would be seen as a page within the /toys/ folder. Same thing with /toys/age9-10
You have your most important page not grouped with all the products it contains.
This is one of the reasons that I prefer ending with the slash. Can you do it the other way, sure, but it just adds more hassle. The folder ending in a slash is a convention that most people follow and frankly, you will find that users also tend to end in a slash when they put in a url. You end up with links to your site where they have a slash and one is needed.
Old habits are hard to break and so this is why I recommend going with the ending slash.
-
-
As for the htaccess fix, a simple 301 redirect from one to the other will do it. I recommend going with the no-slash format.
-
Technically they are different URLs.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
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
-
I have 2 linking root domains on my URL. But I don't get the whole Root domain thing. So I don't understand how I can improve it?
I have 2 linking root domains on my URL. But I don't get the whole Root domain thing. So I don't understand how I can improve it? I copy and pasted this, from my Links page in my campaign because I can't seem to grasp what a root domain is: 'A higher number of good quality linking root domains improves a page's ranking potential'. Can some one explain to me what this is. As simply as possible. Here's my site www.Thumannagency.com Thanks in advance:)
Moz Pro | | MissThumann0 -
Warnings, Notices, and Errors- don't know how to correct these
I have been watching my Notices, Warnings and Errors increase since I added a blog to our WordPress site. Is this effecting our SEO? We now have the following: 2 4XX errors. 1 is for a page that we changed the title and nav for in mid March. And one for a page we removed. The nav on the site is working as far as I can see. This seems like a cache issue, but who knows? 20 warnings for “missing meta description tag”. These are all blog archive and author pages. Some have resulted from pagination and are “Part 2, Part 3, Part 4” etc. Others are the first page for authors. And there is one called “new page” that I can’t locate in our Pages admin and have no idea what it is. 5 warnings for “title element too long”. These are also archive pages that have the blog name and so are pages I can’t access through the admin to control page title plus “part 2’s and so on. 71 Notices for “Rel Cononical”. The rel cononicals are all being generated automatically and are for pages of all sorts. Some are for a content pages within the site, a bunch are blog posts, and archive pages for date, blog category and pagination archive pages 6 are 301’s. These are split between blog pagination, author and a couple of site content pages- contact and portfolio. Can’t imagine why these are here. 8 meta-robot nofollow. These are blog articles but only some of the posts. Don’t know why we are generating this for some and not all. And half of them are for the exact same page so there are really only 4 originals on this list. The others are dupes. 8 Blocked my meta-robots. And are also for the same 4 blog posts but duplicated twice each. We use All in One SEO. There is an option to use noindex for archives, categories that I do not have enabled. And also to autogenerate descriptions which I do not have enabled. I wasn’t concerned about these at first, but I read these (below) questions yesterday, and think I'd better do something as these are mounting up. I’m wondering if I should be asking our team for some code changes but not sure what exactly would be best. http://www.seomoz.org/q/pages-i-dont-want-customers-to-see http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html Our site is http://www.fateyes.com Thanks so much for any assistance on this!
Moz Pro | | gfiedel0 -
How long will it take for Page Rank (or Page Authority) to flow via a 301 redirect?
I've recently redeveloped a static site using WordPress and have created 301 redirects for the original urls to the new urls. I know I won't get all the value passed via the 301, but I'm hoping some will. Any idea how long this may take? It's been nearly a month since the changeover so wondering if it would be weeks, months or more?
Moz Pro | | annomd0 -
How to increase the page authority
Need good rank on this 2 keyword, plz help me if anyone can help. Keywords are : gift card http://www.giftbig.com/gift-cards.html gift voucher http://www.giftbig.com/gift-vouchers.html
Moz Pro | | Joydeep_das0 -
Transfering Page Authority
Hi, I have recently change my url architecture with site redesign and was just doing some analysis of the old and new pages. I seem to be losing a little bit of Organic Search because of it. As an example this old diving page in open site explorer shows a Page Authority of 46 whilst the new diving page shows a Page Authority of 22. I have a 301 redirect going from the old page to the new, but that seems to be quite a drop in Page Authority. Is there anything else I can be doing to improve upon it? Thanks, Adam
Moz Pro | | NaescentAdam0 -
How do I scan down to 10000 pages?
Hi very new here I have set up 5 campaigns, all of fairly large sites. It appears seomoz has scanned 4 of them down to 250 and 1 down to 10000. the one a really want to see down to 10000, my own site is the one I started scanning first well over a week ago. How do I get seomoz to scan further? Thanks
Moz Pro | | First-VehicleLeasing0 -
Duplicate page title
I own a store www.mzube.co.uk and the scam always says that I have duplicate page titles or duplicate page. What happens is thn I may have for example www.mzube.co.uk/allproducts/page1. And if I hve 20 pages all what will change from each page is the number at the end and all the rest of the page name will be the same but really the pages are if different products. So the scans think I have 20 pages the same but I havent Is this a concern as I don't think I can avoid this Hope you can answer
Moz Pro | | mzube0 -
Sub-domain not crawled
One of our sites was recently re-designed. The home page is a landing page (www.labadieauto.com) and I moved the blog to this domain (labadieauto.com/blog/) and put a link is the bottom left of the home page. Since the change the SEOMOZ campaign overview is showing only 1 page crawled. This is not setup as a sub-domain so why isn't it showing in the crawl? Help!
Moz Pro | | LabadieAuto0