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Unnecessary 301s?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

380

Ideas-Money-Art last edited by

hi mozzers,

I'm doing an audit on a website. I detected over 60 301s of this nature: www.example.com/help 301d to www.example.com/help/.

I believe these are completely useless and increase page load time. Am I right? should i kill those 301s?

Thanks
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Joe.Robison last edited by

I second what Ray says, having the rule in your .htaccess file is always a good practice. Especially to prevent the annoyance of seeing both versions in your Google Analytics.

This question was answered in another Moz Q&A, and although it's from 2012 the responses are still good.
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Ray-pp last edited by
It looks like the 301s were meant to force a trailing slash at the end of the URL. This would be done to prevent duplicate URLs. However, rather than add each URL manually, you could replace it with a regex

Example:
```
<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)([^/])$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1$2/ [L,R=301]</code> 
```
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