Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
-
Hello,
Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links).
Links that used to send to
example.com/webpage.htmlWere now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash).
We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash.
However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?
-
Yes you want to have it match the canonical tag so most effective method is to 301 redirect so they match the canonical tag site map and robots.txt etc. You can use a Regex code like this at the end of the URL /?$ in the case of category URLs it will allow them when needed.
if you use the proper 301 you will not have to deal with the category issue anyway.
rel="canonical" href="https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-on-url-trailing-slash" />
I hope this is able to shed more light on the issue and great answer Eric.
Hope I was of help,
Tom
-
Hi Eric,
I was at Step 3 of your 3 Step plan, looking for confirmation as to whether or not the 301 redirects were required in this situation.
Thanks!
-
Hi yacpro13! Did Eric or Thomas answer your question, and if so, would you mind marking one or both responses as a "Good Answer?"

Otherwise, what questions do you still have?
-
If you have changed the URLs with trailing slashes, then there are a few things you'll want to do:
-
make sure all the internal links on your site are updated to point to the proper version.
-
make sure that the sitemap.xml file(s) are correct, pointing to the proper version.
-
set up 301 permanent redirects so that the ones with the slash are redirecting to the old URLs.
As long as you have corrected the links internally, updated the sitemap file, and set up the 301 redirects, everything should go "back to normal" within a fairly short period of time. You will need to give it time, though, as Google will need to re-crawl all of those URLs and get it all ironed out.
-
-
I have provided the Apache and Nginx configurations you would need in addition to a URL that will convert
Apache Htaccess to Nginx
The instructions are right here
Remove Trailing Slash
Just like with the WWW example, some prefer to remove the trailing slash. It's a commonly debated question that you'll find around the Internet, but it just depends on what you prefer.
Remember, though, your browser and even your server, by default, add a trailing slash to a directory. It is done for a reason. If you must strip the trailing slash, though, this is how you would do it:
<code class="hljs apache">RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]</code>For Nginx
nginx configuration location ~ (.)$ { } location / { if (!-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^(.)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 redirect; } }
The explanation for this rule is the same as it is for when we want to add a trailing slash, just in reverse. We can also specify specific directories that we don't want apply this rule over.
<code class="hljs apache">RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !directory/(.*)$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]</code>For Nginx
nginx configuration location ~ directory/(.)$ { } location ~ (.)$ { } location / { if (!-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 redirect; } }
Please see the note about mod_dir and the
DirectorySlashdirective in the previous example. You might need to turn this directive off.HTaccess converter for Apache to Nginx configuration.
http://winginx.com/en/htaccess
https://www.maxcdn.com/one/tutorial/remove-trailing-slash/
https://www.crucialhosting.com/knowledgebase/htaccess-apache-rewrites-examples
https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-remove-trailing-slashes-in-urls-using-htaccess-apache
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
-
How to enable lost trailing slash redirection in WordPress with Yoast plugin
Hi, We have lost the non-slash to slash URL redirection in our WP site. We are using Yoast SEO. All the settings are normal and we have enabled the related code in .htaccess too. Still we couldn't able to find why we lost. Please help. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Contextual FAQ and FAQ Page, is this duplicate content?
Hi Mozzers, On my website, I have a FAQ Page (with the questions-responses of all the themes (prices, products,...)of my website) and I would like to add some thematical faq on the pages of my website. For example : adding the faq about pricing on my pricing page,... Is this duplicate content? Thank you for your help, regards. Jonathan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathanLeplang0 -
Duplicate Titles caused by multiple variations of same URL
Hi. Can you please advise how I can overcome this issue. Moz.com crawle is indicating I have 100's of Duplicate Title tag errors. However this is caused because many URL's have been indexed multiple times in Google. For example. www.abc.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adhunna
www.abc.com/?b=123 www.abc.com/ www.abc.com/?b=654 www.abc.com/?b=875 www.abc.com/index.html What can I do to stop this issue being reported as duplictae Titles, as well as content? I was thinking maybe I can use Robots.txt to block various query string parameters. I'm Open to ideas and examples.0 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1 -
Duplicate content on subdomains.
Hi Mozer's, I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com. So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0 -
Infinite Redirect Loop without trailing slash, please help
I've been searching for an answer all day, I can't seem to figure this out. When I Fetch my blog as Google(http://www.mysite.com/blog) WITHOUT a trailing slash at the end, I get this error: The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop **HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently** When I Fetch my blog as Google WITH the trailing slash at the end(http://www.mysite.com/blog/), it is fine without errors. When I pull it up in a browser comes up fine both with and without the trailing slash. My .htaccess file in the root directory contains this: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debc
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] My .htaccess file in the blog directory contains this: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^./index.php/. [NC]
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Do I have something incorrectly coded in these .htaccess files that could be causing this? Or is there something else I should look at? Thank you for any help!!0 -
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0