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Thank you for your response Alan.

If what you say is true why wouldn't google webmaster tools specifically say that in their article on Canonical links? and why would high pr sites like moz.com feel the need to specify the correct link with a canonical link on their homepage. Just because the browsers read the homepage as the same does not suggest to me that it does not matter if one specifies which is the correct one. The question at hand is not whether it can be read but whether it can be back-linked to properly.

Philip,

You are the man. That totally worked.

I do believe that google is smart enough to see them as the same, I also think it would make sense that they are trying to weed out most people that don't know what they are doing by giving priority rank to websites that backlinks that are consistent with their canonical specification. They say in their support articles that they see the trailing slash and no trailing slash sites as 2 separate sites and that webmasters will be spreading their link juice if they don't specify which one to use. It seems to logically follow that if your web users are linking to the "wrong" page, google is not going to give priority because it signifies that the developer is not properly branding his site and/or hasn't created the user experience to cause it to happen properly. Here are 2 sources where google talks about their stance on canonical links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375 . I'd like to hear any more thoughts on my hypothesis.

Hi Philip,

Thank you for your response. I am definitely obsessing, although I'm pretty sure it is not over nothing, and, I would be happy to be proven wrong (it would save me some time) lol.

It is my understanding that a lot of browsers, like Chrome, will remove the slash from their url but just in the graphical user interface because it looks better, while in fact they reading it with the trailing slash at the end. Browser SEAMONKEY does accurately show the trailing slash. The real way to know from the coding is that the page source still shows <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.threewaystoharems.com/" /> , when I really want it to show as <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.threewaystoharems.com" /> (trailing slash omitted). If I were to speculate on what is really going on behind the scenes, is that google knows that most websites are going to default to using a trailing slash and most users are going to link without the trailing slash. It seems to me that google is trying to separate the SEO professionals from the amateurs by seeing these as two different sites and making the professionals have to figure out how to get the trailing slash off of their home pages in order to get their backlinks. If you notice, moz.com 's page source shows no trailing slash on their link rel="canonical" .

Am I crazy? I'm pretty sure I need to figure this out to get my backlinks to link properly.

I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages.

SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website.

SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link.

WHY?  and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is.

THINGS I"VE TRIED:

(1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page.

(2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag.

(3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference.  I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file.

(4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/');  to $redirect_url = home_url('');       nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file.

(5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file  (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) :   RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Please help friends.