Canonical

[NeatIT]

i have some static webpages in root and wordpress installed in subdirectory , Canonical tag for the whole website was with trailing slash , i stripped the HTML extensions for static webpages but i can't force to add trailing slash to the static webpages so i changed the canonical for html webpages  from http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html/ to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles but the Wordpress" http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/ " still with trailing slash , when i've checked my google webmasters i found that my indexed pages dropped down 100 page !

what should i put in the canonical for the static pages? i tried to strip the slash from wordpress but i failed , so my static webpages canonical  with no trailing slash and wordpress with trailing slash .

[NeatIT]

Thanks Dana , can you help me with redirecting non trailing slash to trailing slash at the end , my wordpress is in sub dictionary http://domain.com/blog/

and i have two .htaccess , one in root and one in the wordpress folder.

i tried to solve it by adding that code in the root .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/$1/ [L,R=301]

Wordpress give 200 OK with the two versions ( with and without trailing slash ) and that hurts my SEO
Thanks in advanced

[_nitman]

Completely agreed with Dana on this. I recently helped a startup fixing this problem by setting a redirect rule in their nginx configuration to redirect all the URLs with trailing slash to desired version. PFB the required rule if you're using nginx:

rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;

If you're on LAMP/MAMP/WAMP tech stack, find the apace equivalent of this rule and place it in your apache config file. Hope that helps!

[danatanseo]

Hi there,

Every time I get into the "trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash" discussion with my clients I go back and read this excellent post in the Official Google Webmasters Central Blog by Maile Ohye: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Problem for SEO: Both URLs are producing 200 OKAY status codes, resulting in duplicate content. This can interefere with crawl efficiency and fragments link equity.

Solution: Ideally, rather than relying on canonical tags to achieve what you want, 301-redirect the non-preferred versions of your URLs to the preferred version. Only one URL should return a 200 OKAY status code. The other should 301-redirect. This is a better solution than relying on canonical tags.

Hope that helps!

Dana