Home page duplicate content...

[LiamMcArthur]

Hello all!

I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end:

http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/

For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page?

rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Liam,

If you have a mix of slash and no-slash URL's, just make sure that they all forward correctly.

If you go to www.example.com/product/, does that forward correctly to www.example.com/product, or what does it do?

If you wish to PM me your URL, I will happily do a quick crawl to make sure there is nothing else that might cause you issues.

-Andy

[donford]

No problem Liam,

You can safely canonical your home page to itself. I've had 2 sites setup that way for a few years now.

Good luck,

Don

[LiamMcArthur]

I didn't want to force the removal or the append of a forward slash site-wide because "most" URL's (around 5,000 of them) don't use forward slash (products, categories, pages etc) - but there's a few pages that are part of the CMS such as account, billing, shopping cart etc that do use an appending forward slash. I think I'm going to give the canonical tag a shot for now - I can't see there being any negatives of using it on the home page to point to itself - it's just I've not heard of many people have to use it on the home page!

EDIT: Interesting. I viewed the source of http://www.moz.com/? - to see if they were using a home page canonical tag, and they were!

[donford]

HI Liam,

Yes you can fix this with a canonical tag or you can do a blanket fix that redirects all "/" urls to the non-slash version with .htaccess.

This should work in the .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

Hope it helps,

Don

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Liam,

To enforce a no trailing slash policy sitewide, you need to do this in the .htaccess file. You do this by adding the following:

**`RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]`**

If you wanted to enforce a trailing slash policy, you would instead add this.

RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f RewriteRule^(.*[^/])$ /$1/[L,R=301]

-Andy