SEO, 301s & backslashes at end of URL
-
Wordpess started adding "/" (slashes) at the end of my urls and I've left them up for some time. Will removing them hurt search rankings or do I need to do a 301 redirect?
For example - www.site.com/page1/ changed to www.site.com/page1
Are there any other ramifications I may not be thinking about besides just search rankings.
-
Thank you so much!
-
So, this is HUGE technical SEO mess.
There are two chances - hosting or plugin:
- Hosting - you can fix this with .htaccess quick. There are lot of examples in internet about adding or removing slash in end of url. You need to check and recheck your .htaccess or webserver configuration.
- Plugin - sometime when WP update their plugins some of them comes with something more than bugfix or improvement. This is how they think "shouldn't hurt anybody", but in reality hurt ANYBODY because broke things. You need to try disable plugins one-by-one and see is this caused from them. This can be caused also from theme, WP itself and/or some custom code.
This is cause of problem. But fix is hard because you need evaluate approx time of chance. There are two cases:
- If this happen soon you should fix it ASAP because for bots old pages are missing (you need to confirm that, please check, sometime they can 301 to new page).
- If this happen few months ago and rankings wasn't lost then you can leave it in new format (do also .htaccess fix!). If rankings was lost then you can try to fix this (and also .htaccess fix!). It's difficult decision anyway.
As you can see everything dependent how long is this change and what damages already make. Try to see in SearchConsole more info about crawl and ranking.
I will save you little time with code for removing AND adding trailing slashes:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*[^/])$ /$1/ [L,R=301]First code remove /, second code add / to urls. You also need to check canonicals, sitemaps and fix them according changes.
And one tip. You should always install in WP some plugin for backups. Period. You wasn't first nor last person in the world with situation "something happens". Of course one weekly backup cost you a penny and can save many hours of debugging or trying to fix things. There are many plugins in market with many different features so i can't give advise what will fit to your needs.
-
Will doing so have any impact on rankings or can I just make the full switch all at once without 301's.
-
So does this mean that you can access the same content with and without '/' ?
This would mean duplicate content and duplicate content isnt really liked by Google. You can redirect these urls to the preferred one by using htaccess
There should only be one version live.
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
-
Using the Same Word in Every URL
Just looking to get some opinions on this. Some coupon sites use "coupon" in all of their URLs - this is a practice I would avoid, as to me it is a little spammy. For example:
On-Page Optimization | | vanessakohl
.com/amazon-coupons/
.com/ebay-coupons/
.com/walmart-coupons/
... and so on for thousands of other brands. I don't think this is necessary, as Google will understand from the content, backlinks and the domain name (including the word "coupon") that brand pages are coupon-focused. Any other thoughts on this?0 -
How do you handle URLs with slashes?
I asked this question before, but with a different scenario. I upgraded my plan to a more advanced cart and all of my URLs changed about 1.5 years ago. I knew nothing about redirects and such, so none of that was done. Basically, let's say my site was: http://www.abc.com, but when people actually visit my site, they are directed to https://www.abc.com/. I have asked my host about redirecting and she that it is not possible. In the past, the link shared has been just www.abc.com . Will this hurt my ranking? My second question is ...let's say I have a link http://www.abc.com/blog , but now, the link is http://www.abc.com/blog/ . Will I be affected, since all my old links omit the slash?
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Submitting URLs to Bing and Google
Does Submitting URLs to Bing and Google actually do anything? Is it worthwhile? What I mean is submitting intermittently individual URLS after already submitting the sitemap.
On-Page Optimization | | FCAbroad0 -
Footer and SEO
Hi All... We have a client who wants to really minimize and simply their website. They want to remove some of the footer info. Obviously we do not want to remove any contact or address but they would like to remove the footer menu system. I have read various things about it NOT effecting SEO and that it is there for user navigation and usability. Thoughts? Opinions? zach
On-Page Optimization | | Group20 -
Keyword in url, which way better?
Hello, is there a difference between urls for targeting keyword "brazil tourist visa" fastbrazilvisas.com/tourist or fastbrazilvisas.com/brazil-tourist-visa ? ran the report In-Page Optimization it tells "no keyword usage in url". is there an idea behind that? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Kotkov0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
URL STRUCTURE & RE-WRITING
1.) I need a suggestion from you, please help. How should be the Directory/URL structure if I am offering servicves in many cities of UK/US. /<service>/
On-Page Optimization | | younus
/<service>/<state>/
/<service>/<state>/<city>/ OR /<service>/
/<state>/<service>/
/<state>/<city>/<service>/ Thanks for your time.</service></city></state></service></state></service></city></state></service></state></service></service> What exactly mean by 'URL enforce writer' to rewrite the URL.0 -
Disadvantages & Advantages for this e-commerce URL Structure
Hi all, Just a simple question. What's the disadvantages/advantages to using this URL structure for an ecommerce site: **Category structure: **/category **Subcategory structure: **/subcategory **Product structure: **/product Compared to the standard: /category/subcategory/product Thanks, Nick
On-Page Optimization | | NickPateman810