Trailing Slashes and SEO

[PeaSoupDigital]

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

[max.favilli]

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.

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

Posted: Wednesday, April 21, 2010A lot has changed since then...

[max.favilli]

Google official blog think otherwise:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

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.

[PeaSoupDigital]

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.

[max.favilli]

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.

[MichaelC-15022]

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.