Bingpreview/1.0b Useragent Using Adding Trailing Slash to all URLs
-
The Bingpreview crawler, which I think exists in order to take snapshots of mobile friendly pages, crawled my pages last night for the first time. However, it is adding a trailing slash to the end of each of my dynamic pages. The result is my program is giving the wrong page--my program is not expecting a trailing slash at the end of the urls. It was 160 pages, but I have thousands of pages it could do this to.
I could try doing a mod rewrite but that seems like it should be unnecessary. ALL the other crawlers are crawling the proper urls. None of my hyperlinks have the slash on the end. I have written to Bing to tell them of the problem.
Is anyone else having this issue? Any other suggestions for what to do?
The user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
-
Will do. Forgot to mention Bing is checking into it. But for the reasons you mentioned I am still going to do the 301s. Thanks again.
-
Sounds like a plan. I'd also make every redirect a 301, just in case. Cheers.
-
Thanks for your reply Cyrus. Wow, so much to learn.
I will put in logic via a mod redirect to basically remove the trailing slash and go to the resulting url because otherwise all the trailing slash urls will be a different page of basically a 'no-product' business and the like.
These are all dynamically generated pages, so I think as long as I resolve to the 'proper' no-slash version then I won't need to worry about anything else, like a rel=canonical tag because there wont be any identical content.
Does that sound right to you?
-
On one hand I'd agree with you that you shouldn't have to rewrite those URLs on your end. On the other hand, it's usually best practice to make sure both versions of a URL (with slash and/or without) resolve to the same page. The reason for this is that:
- Search bots, including Google, will often "explore" variations of URLs for discoverability reasons - they want to make sure they are discovering all of your available content.
- People will link to you with and without trailing slashes. If they link to you with a trailing slash and your page breaks, you could be wasting link equity, to say nothing of the bad user experience of people visiting your site from the referral links
- For one reason or another it's common to append URLs with various parameters (for tracking reasons, campaings, etc) and often these URLs are generated by third party services when pointing at your site.
For all of these reasons, it's pretty common to either force redirect trailing slashes (via a 301) or make sure both versions resolve to the same content, and use a rel=canonical tag to indicate to search engines that these are indeed meant to be the same page.
On the other hand, if this is something not feasible and URLs ending in a slash are indeed different pages, you might want to carefully consider what those pages deliver to both humans and bots because it seems inevitable that both will eventually crawl and stumble upon them.
Perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but I hope it helps.
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
-
How to determine if there are any back links still out there for my version 1 URL
My version 1 url was 301 redirected to version 2, years ago. If the version 1 is no longer contributing any SEO juice I would like to cancel that cancel that domain. Is there a way to know if the version 1 url still has any impact on SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhotoStl0 -
Trailing Slash and Non-Trailing Slash Inconsistency
Hi, Majority of the URLs on the site I'm working on are using non-trailing slash, https://example.com/page1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nerdieb
https://example.com/page2
https://example.com/page3 But when it comes to the blog pages, they are using trailing slash: https://example.com/blog/specific-blog-post1/
https://example.com/blog/specific-blog-post2/
https://example.com/blog/specific-blog-pos3t/ Note that there is no duplication here since they have canonical tags. My only concern is that:
Is it okay to have this kind of structure where the blog page have trailing slash while the rest are using non-trailing slash? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers!0 -
Need to change 1 million page URLs
Hey all, I have a community site where users are uploading photos and videos. Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that. All my content pages (individual photo/video) are looking like this: www.domain.com/12345-kw1-kw2-kw3-k4-k5 and so on. Where the 12345 is the unique content ID and the rest are keywords/tags added by the uploader. I would like to get rid of of the keywords after the ID in the URL. My site is well coded, so this can be easily done by changing a simple function, so my content page URLs become this: www.domain.com/ID What is the best course of action? 301 the KW URLs to non-KW version? Canonical? I really want to do this the proper way. Any advice is highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlqsko0 -
How To Organise my URLS - Which is Optimal?
Hi all, I am currently in the process of re-writing my companies website URL structure. Compared to the way the website is structured at the minute, there's going to be a lot more URL's as the previous structure has missed out on a lot of search avenues that i intend to include within the rebuild. one of my issues is basically deciding under which category certain URL's come under, I can think of reasons for both sides but can't quite decide on which is optimal. My company is an automotive/car dealer so we sell cars for certain manufactures as well as offering a number of other services. what I'm curious about is what makes more sense in terms of the category that comes first in the URL. Here's what I am torn between; /(car manufacturer)/servicing OR /servicing/(car-manufacturer) To give you some more info that might influence the decision; In terms of generic keyword targeting, the majority would search in the order of '(car manufacturer) service' as opposed to 'service for (car manufacturer)'. Currently on our site, the sections /(manufacturer) are some of the most authoritative pages that we have on the website, but we've done very little work on /service in the past. For me, this would suggest that naturally the pages flowing from that URL would get an advantage in terms of authority/ranking. With either URL structure, the URL's are eventually going to cross paths - I just need to decide which one is best and should therefore feature first. Hopefully this is somewhat clear. I'd appreciate any suggestions or if you don't quite understand what I'm asking for then general URL advice is also appreciated. Many thanks Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
What things should I consider if I am doing a 301 redirect on only 1 page/blog post?
I wrote a blog post on one of my websites and it got picked up by reddit and I got a bunch of nice backlinks and now that website got a nice boost overall, and especially that blog post page. I now wish I would have posted the article on a different website of mine. I would prefer if this other site was getting the traffic and the good backlinks that I've acquired. What are the pros and cons if I move the content over to my other website, and 301 redirect just that one article to the article location on my other website? The blog post I wrote almost instantly began ranking for certain terms in Google. Ideally I would like my other website to rank for those terms, but I realize there will be some differences as search engines look at the website as a whole and take many factors into consideration. I know there are tons of case studies and information about moving entire sites etc but I couldn't find much on this. Any advice, questions or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bradbowman
Brad0 -
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Ad units or % of ads vs content?
When looking at content "above the fold" is it more important to look at ad units or the visual % of unique content to ads? For example, if there are 6 small ad units or one large ad unit that takes up 30% of the page, which is better for search engines? In general, is 50% unique content above the fold with 50% ads adequate or what % do you try to optimize for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
2 Language Versions on Same URL
A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same. If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French). The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99.... would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French. Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors? The site has several thousand pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0