Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
-
Hi guys,
We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites.
Example:
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/livingSo, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash.
However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule.
Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento?
Keen to hear from you guys.
Cheers,
-
You could always force trailing slashes instead of removing all trailing slashes.
What you really want to establish, is which structure has been linked to more often (internally and externally). A 301 redirect, even a deeper more complex rule - is seldom the answer in isolation. What are you going to do (for example) when you implement this, then you realise most of the internal links use the opposite structure to the one which you picked, and then all your internal redirects get pushed through 301s and your page-speed scores go down?
What you have to do is crawl the site now, in advance - and work out the internal structure. Spend a lot of time on it, days if you have to, get to grips with the nuts and bolts of it. Figure out which structure most internal/external links utilise and then support it
Likely you will need a more complex rule than 'force all' or 'strip all' trailing slashes. It may be the case that most pages contain child URLs or sub-pages, so you decide to force the railing slash (as traditionally that denotes further layers underneath). But then you'll realise you have embedded images in some pages with URLs ending in ".jpg" or ".png". With those, they're files (hence the file extension at the end of the URL) so with those you'd usually want to strip the slash instead of forcing it
At that point you'd have to write something that said, force trailing slash unless the URL ends with a file extension, in which case always remove the slash (or similar)
Picking the right structural format for any site usually takes a while and involves quite a bit of research. It's a variable answer, depending upon the build of the site in question - and how it has been linked to externally, from across the web
I certainly think, that too many people use the canonical tag as a 'cop out' for not creating a unified, strong, powerful on-site architecture. I would say do stick with the 301s and consolidate your site architecture, but do some crawling and backlink audits - really do it properly, instead of just taking someone's 'one-liner' answer online. Here at Moz Q&A, there are a lot of people who really know their stuff! But there's no substitute for your own research and data
If you're aiming for a specific architecture and have been told it could break the site, ask why. Try and get exceptions worked into your recommendations which flip the opposite way - i.e: "always strip the trailing slash, except in X situation where it would break the site. In X situation always force the trailing slash instead"
Your ultimate aim is to make each page accessible from just one URL (except where parameters come into play, that's another kettle of fish to be handled separately). You don't have to have EVERYTHING on the site one way or the other in 'absolute' terms. If some URLs have to force trailing slash whilst others remove it, fine. The point is to get them all locked down to one accessible format, but you can have varied controlled architectures inside of one website
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
-
Website removed from Bing and Yahoo
Hello, Our website howtoremove.guide was recently removed from the Bing and Yahoo index. The first thing we did was contact Bing Webmaster support to ask what the issue was since we did not get any notifications or messages in our webmaster dashboard. The email that we got back said “I have escalated the issue to our engineers and will get back to you once I receive an update.” Since then, we haven't received any word back from them, but we did not find any technical problems and we strongly believe we were manually penalized. We've never had issues with a search engine before, so we are at a loss what to do. Could you please give us advice as to what technical issue our website might have or what could incur a deindex penalty in our case? We want to do everything that is possible to get back into Bing and Yahoo search results ASAP. The website has primarily affiliate content, so we are doing anything we can to clean everything up, but any recommendations will be incredibly useful to us. We are also open to contacting an expert on this, but we have no idea where to look.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThreatAnalyzer0 -
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
What is true impact of permanent magento redirects?
Hi everyone, I got a tough technical SEO question, that is bugging almost everyone in the (ecommerce) company at the moment. Due to a very "unhealthy" structure of Magento folders, with different countries using same folders in different store views, many of our URL's do change almost on a weekly basis and this is terrifying us. What happens is, that there is a "-numberx"(ex. /category/product-1.html) added to hundreds of URLs so that we are more and more concerned about the impact on SEO. I checked the redirect information with the Moz Toolbar and saw, the following information: http://prntscr.com/81v23e So, even though we had URLs with /category/product-1.html, /category/product-2.html,... the redirect seems to go straight to the last number. My question? -Can this be interpreted as one redirect and therefore it is "less" painful from an SEO point of view?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators
-As we do not have a constant target URL, where does the link juice go if the target page constantly keeps changing (number goes still up) Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks0 -
To slash or not to slash - Going from no trailing slashes to trailing slashes sitewide
A friend has a large site and his dev team are about to launch with the sitewide addition of trailing slashes on urls, which are not on the original site. Both versions of the url work e.g. /example and /example/ and the dev team is reluctant to change back as it will take 3 days (developers hey?) My SEO mind tells me this is a bad thing. Yes you could: 301 from non slash to slash but sitewide I don't like the idea because of the small loss in link juice x lots of pages. You could canonical from non slash to slash but the non slash is the original and canonicals are supposed to point to the original version of the content. Any thoughts appreciated Couldn't the devs use the htaccess file to force the / version to the non / version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Sitelink Removal Timeframe
Hi Everyone, Has anyone had experience using the sitelinks demotion tool within GWT after a site redesign? How long does it take for the demotion to go into effect? We just went live with a new version of a site for one of our clients, and the generated sitelinks are no longer valid. I have demoted the urls associated with the old sitelinks, and it's been over a week with no change. Does anyone have experience in a similar situation? Also, for anyone looking for a time frame on changes to a meta description, after resubmitting an updated sitemap, it took 2 days for Google to display an updated meta description. Please advise, Chris Wilson
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_CM0 -
Add noindex,nofollow prior to removing pages resulting in 404's
We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess. Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404. The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is: Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's? Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Using Reg Ex to 301 old categories and query strings in Magento
Hi SEOmoz community! I'm hoping somebody with a little Magento and Reg Ex knowledge will be able to help me out here. I need to 301 some old categories along with their old query strings. Below is an example. Old URL /bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html Users can then filter by price or range which then creates a query string such as... /bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html?price=1%2C10 New URL: /bed-linen/pillowcases.html So the new query string will be /bed-linen/pillowcases.html?price=1%2C10 Does anybody know the Reg Ex to 301 this? Can this be done in Magento re-write module or by htaccess only? Thanks in advance 🙂 Anthony @Anthony_Mac85
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
How to remove an entire site from Google?
Hi people, I have a site with around 2.000 urls indexed in google, and 10 subdomains indexed too, which I want to remove entirely, to set up a new web. Which is the best way to do it? Regards!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoExpertos0