Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Magento Trailing Slash URL Problem
-
Howdy Mozzers!
Our magento store URL's are accessible with or without a trailing slash at the end. Canonical's and 301 redirects are not set up for one of them at the moment.
Will this cause duplicate issue? Do we need to set canonical or 301 up? Which one is recommended?
MozAddict
-
Ok, so we could canonical the first page in the pagination, that way any links to the pagination would flow juicy juice to the first page. That would make sense, since it would strengthen its ranking as a landing page as well.
I think ill implement the canonical and get rid of the content on pagination anyways, just avoid the problem completely.
Ace Marty!
-
If you are using rel canonical then you can have the same on each page and it should be okay.
Otherwise, I would make sure your paginated pages don't have it. The next/prev helps Google to understand these are subsequent pages of the original category but it doesn't really give instruction as to the preferred page, etc. (like the canonical would) so you could end up with Google ignoring the content after it sees it too many times.
-
Appreciate your response Marty.
What is your opinion on content for category pages. Currently we have the same content displaying on paginated pages for the same category (?p=1, ?p=2, etc)
Should we display content just on the first page and remove it for rest of the pagination or is this ok?
We are using rel="next/prev" but not sure if this is treated as duplication?
-
I personally prefer the slash but it doesn't make any difference as long as you're consistent and if as you say Google is already indexing most without, I'd probably go that way too!
-
Great answers guys! I would personally also prefer 301's over canonicals. So the next questions is, to keep URLs with the trailing slash or without the trailing slash. I tend to lean towards without, since most URL's are indexed that way already, its easier on the eyes, and people tend to link that way.
Any preference?
-
Good day MozAddict!
SEO for Magento is near and dear to my heart. From a technical SEO perspective, I would recommend cleaning up the items you mentioned as it can cause issues. The biggest concern is trust flow and having trust split between two versions of the page (ie: the slash and no-slash).
So both the 301 and canonical tag will pass the same amount of trust as the other. So your question is, which do you go with? I think both are fine however I prefer the 301 myself for dealing with the trailing slash issue and here's why.
As time passes, believe it or not, people will link to some of your pages naturally. Because a canonical or 301 doesn't pass the full trust earned from the link, I'd rather someone link to the correct version. If I'm using the canonical tag, they may indeed link to the non-preferred version and I would lose some of that trust, whereas if I am using the 301, they will automatically be shown the correct, preferred version and I earn all the trust from that natural link.
Moz has a great article on canonicalization if you want to read more on it.
Hope this answer is useful to you!
-
Definitely a duplication issue as they are 2 different pages. Pick one way and stick to it, probably remove is the easiest. I would do redirects first, but set canonical as well as a best practice. There is a great guide here:
http://www.kodecreations.co.uk/google/remove-trailing-slash-magento-urls-duplicate-content-issue/
It even includes instructions on how to stop Magento from generating urls with trailing slashes.
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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Why is this SERP displaying an incorrect URL for my homepage?
The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
The canonical and og URLs match.
The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path. And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/. What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?) We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long? [EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]0 -
Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?
It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website: www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123 www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456 etc.. How is this normally handled? Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors. I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood1 -
Problem with redirects in coldfusion
How to redirect pages in cold fusion? If using ColdFusion and modrewrite, the URL will never be redirected from ModRewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL
Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/ and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.0