Trailing Slashes and SEO
-
Hi,
We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine.
We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done.
I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
That's true, and you may be right. But as ignorant as I am, it's the very first time I read url slashes canonicalization is not best practice.
And I truly mean you are probably right, but yet I would like to see some piece of proof, like a video of Matt Cutts, an article on searchenginejournal, or something, before to call what was once considered best practice dead and buried.
-
Posted: Wednesday, April 21, 2010A lot has changed since then...
-
Google official blog think otherwise:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
-
You don't have to worry about a thing, Google is smarter than you think - a trailing slash more or less won't affect your SEO in any way.
-
Hi Massimiliano,
I'm too too sure why the development guys are having issues. I think it may be due to the already being rewritten from blog.domain.co.uk to domain.co.uk/blog - but I'll double check.
-
Blog Engine is just a dotnet framework. Use dotnet url rewriting to redirect properly, you just have to edit web.config to have iis redirect urls with trailing slashes to urls withiut trailing slash.
-
So if you're talking about www.mysite.com/blog vs. www.mysite.com/blog/ I think I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'd definitely see if you could set a rel=canonical on that page to point to one or the other though.
But honestly, your blog homepage isn't generally going to be a search target anyway....it's the blog posts themselves (and possibly the category archives or tag archives) that will be search targets. Plus your site's homepage, of course, and other non-blog pages.
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
-
Do long UTM codes hurt SEO?
Since most UTM codes/URLs are longer than 70ish characters, is this hurting my SEO? If it is, how can I solve the problem while still using a UTM code? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Cassie_Ransom0 -
Optimized filename management for SEO
Hi, I'm currently undertaking a project to manage better my images and to rank for image searches. My site uses mod_pagespeed to optimises images, therefore image urls are changed to a pretty seo unfriendly url or even sometimes inlined within my page. On top of that I generally resize all my images by passing the desired file dimension within the image url in order to optimise the loading time of my site. Is there a way to provide a hint to google that I have a much better quality image with higher dimensions and better name? Can i specify within my image sitemap an image that actually does have different dimensions and a different within the page it serves? Are there better tricks to achieve that? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mattam0 -
SEO problem: wrong language sitelinks
The French and German version of my web site are showing mixed language sitelinks I have no idea how to fix this now that Google have remove demote sitelinks feature, how can I make sure only the german site links appear in the german version of the site and french site links only appear in the french version of the site? www.mercimamanboutique.com/de-de/ www.mercimamanboutique.com/fr-fr/ Thanks again
Technical SEO | | ss20160 -
SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
Technical SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Will removing the trailing slash impact my SEO?
Hi there, We have a company website based on Wordpress. I just noticed that under Settings > Permalinks I can configure the look of the URLs and even remove the trailing slash. We have about 2-300 pages online. If I remove the trailing slash now, will that negatively impact our SEO in anyway for existing pages? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Amr-Haffar0 -
Geographic location of hosting affect SEO
Can anyone confirm if its the geographic location of the web hosting or the domain hosting that can affect seo ? I have a client who has their domain hosting and Website hosting in Australia however their they have a .co.nz and their target market is in New Zealand. thank you
Technical SEO | | summer3000 -
When Should You Start SEO?
I am launching a new website (related to IT services) on Monday 6th May 2013. What should be my SEO/SMO/PPC strategy for a brand new website with new domain ? I have a blog within the website as well. Is it better to promote internal blog or should i focus on external bogs like wordpress ?
Technical SEO | | afycon0