Duplicate page found with MOZ crawl test?
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When I crawl my website www.radiantguard.com, the crawl test comes back with what appears to be a duplicate of my home page:
http://www.radiantguard.com and http://www.radiantguard.com/
Does the crawler indeed see two different pages and therefore, are my search engine rankings potentially affected, AND
is this because of how my rel canonical is set up?
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Thanks Ryan and Chiaryn! All looks good then! So happy
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Hey Rhonda,
I took a look at your crawl test and I don't see that we are reporting any duplicate pages for http://www.radiantguard.com or http://www.radiantguard.com/. We are actually reporting that http://www.radiantguard.com/ is the canonical tag of http://www.radiantguard.com and we would never report a page as a duplicate of the canonical tag. We do consider these two pages as separate pages, as many sites do also treat them differently, so we try to encompass the most sites with the way we report on pages with trailing slashes.
You may still want to consider Ryan's advice regarding how to deal with these two pages, however, I just wanted to clarify that we are not reporting any duplicates on either pages. Here is a screenshot of the CSV that shows that these pages have no reported duplicates: http://www.screencast.com/t/5FHTfyQe
I hope that helps to clear things up a bit, but please do let me know if you have more questions about the crawl report.
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Hi Rhonda. Google has a nice article on this very subject here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html The main point is that it's a best practice to choose one or the other format for your locations. From the article:
You can do a quick check on your site to see if the URLs:
http://<your-domain-here>/<some-directory-here>/
(with trailing slash)
http://<your-domain-here>/ <some-directory-here>(no trailing slash)
don’t both return a 200 response code, but that one version redirects to the other.</some-directory-here></your-domain-here></some-directory-here></your-domain-here>If only one version can be returned (i.e., the other redirects to it), that’s great! This behavior is beneficial because it reduces duplicate content. In the particular case of redirects to trailing slash URLs, our search results will likely show the version of the URL with the 200 response code (most often the trailing slash URL) -- regardless of whether the redirect was a 301 or 302.
A 301 redirect is best as it should be the permanent structure of your site moving forward. Cheers!
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